Carrion Wall

Most defensive Walls of its era leaned on toughness to survive: this one inverts the math. The 3/2 body is the aggressive number, the kind that trades up into early attackers, and the regeneration shield is what keeps a wall that can be killed from actually dying. Spending to reset it after every block, the card holds a ground stall against creatures that would otherwise pick it off with a point of reach damage or a small burn spell. Regeneration also dodges the destruction-based sweepers of its day, since a regenerated creature is removed from combat and refreshed rather than left dead. The trade-off is the one every regeneration ability carries: it taps two mana to do nothing but stand still, and the replacement effect only answers destruction. Sacrifice effects, edicts, exile, and bounce all walk right past it, because none of those destroy the creature for regeneration to intercept. As black's contribution to the defensive-creature category, it is unusual mostly for being black at all: the color rarely got dedicated blockers, and pairing one with a repeatable regeneration cost was a tidy way to let a controlling black deck buy turns without splashing for fixing or holding up a removal spell.