Bear Cub

The vanilla 2/2 for is the most-printed body in Magic's design vocabulary, and this is among its plainest expressions: no keyword, no enters-the-battlefield text, nothing but a creature type that happened to be load-bearing once. Grizzly Bears set the curve point years earlier; Bear Cub exists because the Portal sets were teaching products that needed clean, frictionless creatures with no stack interactions to explain to new players. That design brief is why so much of the early game lived at exactly this rate: two power, two toughness, two mana, costed so a beginner could read the board and understand combat without parsing a single ability. The card has since become a measuring stick in the other direction. When designers talk about how much a two-drop's text is worth, the unspoken baseline is the Grizzly Bears statistic, and Bear Cub is its literal twin. Everything green prints at this slot now (a mana dork, a body with reach, a creature that draws a card) is priced against the blank version, which earns nothing for itself but combat math. It is a reference point dressed as a card.