A-Armory Veteran

The "A-" prefix marks this as a rebalanced Arena variant, and the single change tells you exactly what the digital team decided the paper card was missing: protection. The tabletop original gave you a two-drop whose menace only switches on once the creature is equipped, an offensive rider that means nothing until you've committed a piece of Equipment to it, and a body that could still be chump-traded into irrelevance the moment an opponent had a removal spell ready. The Alchemy version keeps that equip payoff untouched and bolts on ward at a cost of two life, answering the real fragility of any deck built around gearing up one creature: the removal that arrives the moment you invest. That is the design logic worth noticing. The equip-menace half rewards commitment, and commitment is precisely what invites a two-for-one blowout, so ward is the patch that taxes the interaction rather than shutting it off. A life cost rather than a mana cost is the deliberate part: ward can always be refused (the opponent simply lets their removal be countered), but a life payment is rarely one the defender casting that removal lacks the resources to make, unlike a mana tax that can strand a spell for a turn. It's a targeted rebalance, not a redesign: same tribe, same body, same conditional menace, with one keyword added to shore up the weakness that made the paper version a nonstarter.