Ardent Militia

Look at this body as a solution to a constraint the rest of Magic never imposed on itself: the Portal design rules forbade printing an actual Wall, so a defensive blocker had to be built out of legal parts. The 2/5 is that translation. The toughness does the wall's job; the two power and vigilance let a beginner attack without surrendering the block, teaching attack-without-risk before the new player had to grasp tapping as a cost. Vigilance carries the whole lesson, parseable from its reminder text alone, which is the entire point of a set written in a beginner's vocabulary. By any later metric, five mana for a 2/5 is dismal, but Portal tuned its power level for clarity rather than competition, and a body that simply survives and never chooses between offense and defense is exactly the low-stakes board presence a teaching set wanted to model. What survives here is a record of a specific design problem: how to express complex board states (a defensive body, an attack that costs nothing) inside the smallest possible rules footprint, when the usual keyword for the job was off the table.