Eager Cadet

No rules text to misread, no ability to evaluate, no synergy to chase: a vanilla 1/1 for one white mana, the exact floor of what a creature can cost and be worth. That is precisely its function. This is the reference point a designer leans on to price keywords and bodies: add a point of power and you are most of the way to Savannah Lions, the 2/1 vanilla that sets white's aggressive baseline; bolt on a useful ability instead and the cost has to climb. By itself the Cadet teaches the rate, showing you what a single white mana buys when it buys nothing extra. The name and flavor lean into that emptiness: an unproven recruit who has done nothing yet, a soldier still waiting to earn a line of text. It rounds out a tribal count or fills a starter deck and asks for nothing more, and it has been reprinted across enough core and beginner products to rank among the most-printed creatures with no abilities at all. Its value is pedagogical, not strategic: it shows you where the bottom is.