Blade Instructor

Three power is the number that makes a Mentor host worth running: it can drop a counter on anything swinging for one or two, which on a wide go-tall board is most of the early team. The 1 toughness is the invoice for that reach. Mentor only fires when the host attacks, so the engine demands that a fragile body go back into the red zone turn after turn, which is precisely the commitment the stat line cannot safely make. A 3/1 will trade with plenty of mid-sized blockers, but it dies to the same removal and combat math that any one-toughness creature does, and once it is off the board it stops seeding future combats. That is the balancing act that keeps a turn-three play growing your board from being oppressive: the counter distribution runs only as long as the class keeps showing up, and the body offers no guarantee it will. This is the common-rarity distillation of Mentor's central tension, a keyword that rewards throwing a creature into the attack step over and over while pricing that repeated commitment into a host that cannot afford to be there. Point it at a line of one-power soldiers and it reads like a slow anthem; point it at a 2/2 and you are gambling three power against two toughness every combat. The instructor teaches the same lesson each attack, and can only keep teaching it while it survives to do so.