Johan

A Legends design experiment that tried to encode the concept of a battlefield general into rules text, and showed exactly how clumsy the early game was at expressing what it wanted to express. The mechanic is a vigilance-for-the-team aura stapled to a body, gated by an opt-in restriction: keep Johan home, and your other attackers swing without tapping. Nothing in 1994 had that shape. Vigilance as a keyword did not exist yet (it was still written out as "attacking doesn't cause this creature to tap"), and the idea of one creature granting a combat-step benefit to others was the kind of effect Legends kept reaching for and kept building out of long, conditional paragraphs. The result reads now like a rough draft of an ability word: a lord that grants pseudo-vigilance, paying for it with its own offense. Modern design would compress this to two lines and a keyword, probably print it cheaper, and not bother with the legendary tag. The trade itself is the part still worth a second look, a genuinely interesting tempo question: the same turn you want to swing hardest is the turn you most want Johan untapped to block, and the ability forces you to pick. The execution is dated; the design question underneath it is still a good one.