Jace Beleren

The starter-set planeswalker, and the one Wizards built to teach the card type. When the planeswalker era opened with the Lorwyn five, Jace Beleren was the deliberately tame entry: a three-loyalty walker whose plus ability hands a card to everyone, whose minus is a single card drawn for one player, and whose ultimate mills twenty rather than ending the game outright. That symmetry is the design discipline. The +2 advances loyalty fast while refusing to give you a private advantage, so the card teaches loyalty math and the cost of protecting a walker without warping a format around card advantage. It is the planeswalker that does the least, on purpose, which is why it became the reprint workhorse: a clean rules-text reference printed into starter products and intro decks for years. The contrast that defines it is the one drawn against its successor. Jace, the Mind Sculptor arrived two years later with four abilities, a Brainstorm on a stick, and a fateseal lock, and proved how much headroom the type actually had. Beleren is the control; Mind Sculptor is the experiment that broke the curve. Read the two side by side and the whole arc of early planeswalker design is legible: start with a creature-like value engine that draws cards and survives, then learn exactly how far past that baseline the card type can be pushed before it stops being fair.