Ertai

The Vanguard series was an experiment in giving players an avatar instead of a deck: a card that sat outside the game proper and rewrote your starting conditions and a passive rule for the rest of the match. Ertai's contribution is a blanket protection clause, granting your whole board what would later be codified as hexproof, long before that keyword existed. That timing is the interesting part. When this avatar was printed, the modern hexproof template was not yet in the rules vocabulary; the protection-from-targeting effect it grants had to be spelled out longhand, and the card now carries the cleaned-up oracle wording retrofitted to match a keyword invented years afterward. As a design object it is a curiosity twice over: a format that no longer exists, expressing a mechanic that did not yet exist, through an effect that has since become routine board-wide protection in supplemental sets. The flavor pull is Ertai himself, the apprentice wizard of the Weatherlight saga whose arc through that block was defined by defensive, controlling magic, which makes a static "your creatures can't be touched" the on-character read. Stripped of the Vanguard framing, the effect is simply opponent-side targeting denial applied to every creature you control, with no cost and no upkeep: the kind of always-on protection that today would be a build-around enchantment, here delivered as a starting condition.