Alaborn Trooper
A vanilla 2/3 for with no abilities, this is what a beginner-product common looked like when Wizards stripped a card down to nothing but a body. Portal Second Age dispensed with the stack and complex triggers entirely, so the white soldier here exists to do exactly one thing: stand on the ground as a slightly-better-than-trade blocker that survives the small burn and combat math a new player would encounter. The 2/3 split is the design tell. Two power makes it a clock, three toughness makes it awkward to remove with the cheap damage spells of a teaching set, and the absence of any rules text means there is nothing to misplay. Later sets would dress this stat line up with a keyword or a tribal payoff; here it is presented bare, a lesson in what a fair midrange creature feels like before keywords enter the conversation. The only adornment is flavor text, which sells the Alaborn cavalry as a proud military fiction, doing the worldbuilding work the rules text deliberately declines to do. There is no archetype to slot it into and no engine it powers, which is the point: it was made for a player who did not yet have a deck, only a starter pile and a first opponent.

