For Challenge # 066. Oh, hai there Selesneya. You looked sad, so I made you a card based on a classic Green-White card Dueling Ground. Enjoy!

Giggle! Fantastically opposed to Selesnya, yes :) (This was most recently Silent Arbiter, I think.)

Would the current pie put it in green though? If I were designing this from scratch, I think I'd make it . Or just plain .

­ and replace First Strike with Exalted and you have a great Bant card.

If I was to guess, I would probably say that, back in 2000, Wizards thought this made a great green ability because green likes to make giant creatures with trample and swing with them. The most common (non-combo) green-white decks from when this card was being designed often included Serra Angel, Erhnam Djinn and constantly wiping the board. You can see how this card would make sense with those sorts of decks.

This was before MaRo headed up his big color-pie rewrite, and before a time when cards needed a reason to sit within the philosophy of their colors. Green is all about making creatures, and this restricts what you can do with creatures. Today, people would argue that makes this not very green. In 2000, that wasn't as much a concern. This effect worked well within the confines of green, and hadn't been worked into any other color. That's what made it green to them.

I do think this could still be a green effect, but not with the flavor Dueling Grounds gave it (or Logjam Duelist for that matter). It's got to be obvious that primacy is involved - the idea that biggest is best, and that we should only be attacking with our biggest creature. The art should show a king of the jungle, with other creatures cowing before it.

It sure doesn't have to be green, though. Funny thing is that this card would look fine to me if it cost : the white provides the attacking restriction, while the red provides the blocking restriction.

It'd certainly also do pretty well as a anti-Boros card :)