Hill Giant

The textless beater that aggressive red got to call full retail in the earliest days, and the body the design team kept around to mark where the rate sat. The vanilla 3/3 never had a job beyond establishing the baseline: a creature with no abilities, at these dimensions, costs what it costs. When Wizards wanted to push the curve forward, they shaved a mana and handed the same body to green (Trained Armodon and the long line of 3/3s that followed it); when they wanted to charge for an ability, they kept this chassis and bolted something onto it. That makes Hill Giant a teaching tool more than a constructed card: the reference point that lets a designer describe a new three-drop as this minus a mana, plus a drawback, and have everyone at the table understand instantly. Competitive printings dropped it long ago, but its shadow falls on every red beater whose stat line you have sized up by reflex. The card's whole significance is that it has none beyond the baseline. It is the zero point everything else gets measured against.