Ebon Dragon

Black got a 5/4 flier with a discard rider in an introductory set, and the rate tells you everything about who it was tuned for. Seven mana for a body that black's expert-level expansions were already beating handily, with a disruption clause (a "may," targeted, triggering only on entry) that is too small and too late to matter. The discard exists to show a brand-new player that creatures can do something beyond attack, not to swing a game; the entry trigger is the safest possible demonstration of that lesson, with no stack interaction to parse and no downside to fear. Flying does the same teaching work from the other direction: a keyword the new player already grasps intuitively, attached to a Dragon big enough to feel like a payoff. What gives the card a life beyond its weak rate is the printing itself. Old-frame templating, plain-English rules text, and the limited circulation of those introductory printings handed several of these Dragons a collector afterlife out of all proportion to what they ever did across a table. Read it less as a creature that fell behind the curve and more as a fossil of a specific design brief: write Magic legibly for someone who has never read a Magic card, then dress the lesson up as a Dragon.