Wild Nacatl

A one-drop that scales by manabase, which is a stranger design than the rate suggests. In mono-green it stays a 1/1, a deliberate tax on the color that prints it: green pays full price for the card and gets the worst version. Add a Mountain and it is a 2/2 for one; add a Plains alongside it and it is a 3/3 for one, a stat line that has no business existing at that cost. The trick is that nothing about the abilities requires those lands to do anything else, so the natural home was always the most aggressive multicolor manabase that could support all three colors, where every fetchland and dual fixed the deck and pumped the cat at the same time. That confluence of cheap, reliable fixing and a creature that rewarded it directly is what built Zoo around it, a payoff strong enough to draw scrutiny in formats whose mana had only gotten better since this kind of design first appeared. The body never changed; the manabases caught up to it. Strip away the multicolor enablers and it reverts to a plain 1/1, which is the whole tension: a creature whose power level is set entirely by the lands sitting next to it.