Woolly Spider

Reach was not a keyword yet when this saw print: spiders of this era simply read "may block as though they had flying," and this body belongs to that first generation of green air defense, built around the premise that the ground deck needs a dedicated answer to evasion rather than a generically useful creature. What earns the slot is the toughness it gains in the act of blocking. A 2/3 base trades down to most fliers it would want to stop, but the +0/+2 on block reshapes the math, letting it survive the exchange and keep gumming up the skies turn after turn. The reward is conditional and reactive: nothing happens on offense, nothing against a ground assault, and the buff fires only when it blocks something with flying, making the creature a pure tax on an opponent's evasive plan. That narrowness is the point. It is not a value body you splash for upside; it is a sideboard-style answer printed into the main set, green's response to a world where flying was the dominant way to close out a game. The toughness-pumping-on-block template recurs throughout Magic's history whenever designers want a defensive creature that excels against one axis and sits inert against everything else.