Desert Nomads

Two abilities, one idea. As a 2/2 for three mana that becomes unblockable through any Desert, this is the red entry in a landwalk cycle keyed to Arabian Nights' signature land type. The damage-prevention rider is the part worth dwelling on. Desert was built as a soft anti-creature tax, pinging attackers for 1 at end of combat, so the Nomads do not merely walk past Deserts the way a Merfolk walks past an Island: they are immune to the very mechanic the land was printed to enforce. That is tighter design than the surface suggests, a creature whose two lines of rules text express the same fiction twice. This is a creature that lives in the desert, and the text means it. Desertwalk is functionally vestigial outside of mirrors and the handful of Desert-matters builds scattered across the card pool, which is why the cycle reads today as a flavor exercise more than a competitive one. But the template (an evasion keyed to a land type, paired with immunity to that land type's drawback) shows early Magic using mechanics and flavor to say the same thing in concert, back when the game was still working out how those two were supposed to talk to each other.