Faerie Noble

A green Faerie lord from a set whose tribal lords mostly went looking for tribes that did not exist yet. Faeries in the mid-90s were not an archetype; they were a scattering of small fliers across blue and green with no critical mass and no payoff, which left this card anchoring a deck that the card pool could not actually field. The design is conventional lord work split across two axes: a static +0/+1 to keep the team alive and a tap-activated +1/+0 to turn a board of evasive bodies into a clock. The tap cost is what keeps the buff honest, since pumping the team means the Noble itself stays out of combat: you trade its own 1/2 flying body for an attack-step boost to everyone else, choosing between a lord that fights and a lord that buffs. That decision only matters when you have other Faeries to point it at, and that was the gap. Green's place in the color pie kept it from being the natural home for an evasive flier tribe, so the lord that should have headlined a tribe spent years without one. Its design reads cleanly today precisely because later sets built the tribe it was waiting for, in blue and black rather than green, and gave the two-axis lord template a board worth buffing.