Battle Rampart

Walls are built to sit still, which is what makes this one quietly subversive: it spends its turn not blocking but pushing a freshly cast creature into the red zone the moment it arrives. The haste grant resolves the central tension of midrange creatures, that a beater you play on turn five does nothing until turn six. Tap this and it swings the same turn, every turn, while the wall itself never leaves the back rank. The design honesty is in the body: a 1/3 with Defender is a genuine blocker, so the card pays for its repeatable enabling by being a real wall first and a haste engine second. That dual life is the point. It can stonewall the ground in a stalled board and, on the same axis, turn a topdecked finisher into immediate pressure. Granting haste to a single creature once per turn is narrow compared to the team-wide motors that came later, but the targeting is open: any creature, including an opponent's if some reason demanded it, though the obvious home is your own freshly summoned threat. What it represents is an early attempt to fold an aggressive enabler into a defensive shell, asking whether a creature can both hold the line and accelerate the kill. The answer turned out to be yes, at a tempo slow enough that the wall stays an accomplice rather than the threat.