Willow Priestess

A tap-to-cheat-permanents-from-hand engine printed before there was a tribe to cheat into. The first ability does the architectural work: tapping to drop a Faerie permanent from hand sidesteps the mana cost entirely, a repeatable cost-reduction template that later sets would gate behind tighter restrictions and bigger payoffs. The catch is the supply side. Faerie permanents were scarce in the card pools of the era, so the engine asks you to build around a creature type the set barely supported. The second ability reads as a window into the format it was designed for: protection from black, granted to any green creature (this one included), in an environment where mono-black removal and reanimation were the default disruptive line. It is a tax-mode survival button, and because it costs rather than the tap, it runs parallel to the cheat engine rather than competing with it: the Priestess can keep tapping to drop Faeries while still spending mana to point protection at herself or a key threat. The two halves coexist; they simply never found a deck to coexist in. What lingers is the template rather than the rate: a permanents-from-hand cheat that the game has revisited many times since, here yoked to a tribe and a defensive clause that never cohered. A keystone in search of a tribe, sized with the same caution that defined its set.