Alabaster Dragon

A white dragon whose death trigger is the most revealing thing about it, precisely because Portal sanded the game down to its splashiest parts: no instants in the early printings, simplified templating, large readable creatures. A 4/4 flyer for six sat on the cautious side of the curve, so the design handed it a clause that scans to a newcomer as pure upside: it never really stays dead, it just goes home and waits. The shuffle-into-library line is where the quiet sophistication lives. It sidesteps reanimation hate by leaving the graveyard almost as soon as it arrives, but the price is steep in its own way: the dragon disappears into the randomized depths of your deck rather than returning to hand or battlefield, so you cannot recur it on purpose. That tension (an investment that feels indestructible yet stays out of your control) teaches opportunity cost while dressed as a flavor beat about a creature too majestic to rot. Later sets would sharpen the same instinct into deliberate recursion engines and the "tuck" effects that punished commanders for years, but here the framing stays instructional: a card that quietly demonstrates the graveyard exists, and that not everything ends up there.