Dwarven Soldier

The Dwarves and Orcs of Sarpadia were at war in the fiction, and this card encodes that hostility directly into combat: the +0/+2 only triggers against Orcs, a piece of conditional toughness that does nothing in a board state without the enemy faction present. That is the structural quirk worth noting. The bonus is reactive and narrow, keyed to a creature type the controller's own deck has no reason to run, so the ability functions as built-in combat insurance against a specific opponent rather than a stat the controller can ever rely on. The moment no Orc is across the table, which is most of the time, the 2/1 attacks and blocks like a body whose rules text is dead weight. Fallen Empires is full of these targeted designs (creatures whose abilities only matter against their own world's enemy faction), and they read today as an early, awkward experiment in fusing flavor and mechanics into a single combat trigger. The lesson the design school took from it: tying a creature's combat math to an opponent's specific creature type produces a card that is either irrelevant or a hard counter, with very little in between.