Ihsan's Shade

A vanilla 5/5 body for six mana would have been unremarkable even in this card's era, but the single keyword line is the whole pitch. White was then the color of mass removal, the big damage-prevention effects, and the swords-to-plowshares school of dealing with attackers. Protection from white meant the spot removal could not target it, the damage could not touch it, and a white blocker could neither stop it in combat nor survive the swing. That was a remarkably pointed piece of color-pie tension: a black threat built specifically to walk through what white was best at. The legendary tag and the Shade Knight type line gesture at a named character, but the design lives entirely in the protection clause, which made the card less a generic beater than a directed answer to a single color's defensive toolkit. The friction that keeps it honest is the rate (six mana, three of them black, for a body that does nothing against any other color) and the narrowness of the protection itself: against a deck with no white, this is an expensive 5/5 and nothing more. That conditionality is the design discipline; the card is overcosted on purpose so the matchup-specific upside has a price. As an early creature whose value is entirely a function of what it ignores rather than what it does, it reads cleaner than most of its contemporaries: the rate is bad, but the rate is bad for a reason you can name.