Charging Paladin

Swings in as a 2/2 and lands as a 2/5: that gap is the entire design. The attack trigger fires only on offense, so on defense the Knight stays a flat 2/2; the asymmetry between its printed body and its attacking body is what the card exists to demonstrate. A defender facing the swing has to do real math: take two damage, or commit a blocker that now has to survive longer than its size suggested. A 3/3 that would have eaten the Knight on defense instead bounces off a 2/5 and lives, but so does the Knight, so the trade the defender wanted never happens. Portal's design philosophy fixated on combat above all else (attacking is good, blocking is a decision, creatures change size when the swing happens), and this Human Knight is one of the cleanest encodings of that lesson on a single card. The point is to make a player notice that combat math is not fixed: a 2/2 you would happily block becomes a 2/5 the instant it attacks, and the same body you sized up correctly a moment ago no longer dies to your defense. The trigger has since spread across hundreds of attack-trigger creatures with sturdier rates and more meaningful upside, but few carry the intent this nakedly. Pared down to its toughness pump, the card is a small, deliberate object lesson: here is why you would swing into a board you cannot obviously beat, and here is how the board reacts when you do.