Armor Thrull

A one-shot stat buff dressed up as a creature, and a snapshot of how early black thought about sacrifice. The Thrull tribe was Fallen Empires' enslaved-servant subtheme, bred by the Order to be expended, and Armor Thrull wears that flavor in its mechanics: a 1/3 body whose entire purpose is to tap, die, and hand its toughness-heavy investment to something that will survive the exchange. The counter it leaves behind is permanent, which separates it from a combat trick: this is not a pump you cast at the right moment but a resource you cash in once and forever. The wrinkle is the +1/+2 split. Most early stat-boosting effects favored power for the obvious reason that power closes games; weighting the bonus toward toughness instead points the card at defense and durability, turning a fragile body into ablative armor for a creature you actually care about. That made it a strange fit for the aggressive black decks of its era and a natural one for the grind, where trading a chump for a permanently sturdier threat is a fair rate. The sacrifice clause is doing the balancing work that a recurring pump ability would not: you get the upgrade exactly once, so the Thrull asks to be played as fuel rather than as a board presence, which is precisely the role its world built it for.