Coral Merfolk

Vanilla in the strict sense: no oracle text, no keyword, just a body that trades up against most one-drops and dies to nearly everything else. Cards like this exist as the baseline against which the real Merfolk get measured. It does exactly what a blue two-drop with no abilities is allowed to do at this rate and nothing more, which is the design point. The 2/1 split is the tell. Blue's small creatures historically lean toward toughness for board presence (Wall of Air, the various islandwalkers), so leading with power here gives a faintly aggressive body that the color rarely supports with combat tricks. Reprinted across multiple core sets as common-rarity creature filler, it filled out an Island-heavy curve in eras when a plain beater still earned a slot, then quietly aged out as blue's two-drops started carrying card advantage and evasion as a matter of course. There is no story underneath the stat line, and that honesty is what makes it useful as a reference object: it sets the price floor for a body at this cost, the zero against which a lord's anthem or a tempo trigger gets valued. Every extra line of text on a two-mana blue creature is, in effect, the difference between that creature and this one.