Keldon Warlord

Look at what that single word "Wall" is buying. Without it, this is a free finisher in any deck that runs a few bodies; with it, R&D drew a line between the creatures meant to win the board and the creatures meant to stall it, and counted only the former. Every non-Wall creature you control feeds the size, regardless of what it is doing in combat, which makes the Warlord a clean reading of how committed your board actually is. The exclusion does the balancing work, and it does it elegantly: a defensive shell of blockers grants you nothing, so the card only swells when you are already developing into a fight. The fragility is the price of the rate. Because power and toughness are recalculated continuously rather than fixed on cast, a sweeper that catches your team also drops the Warlord to a 1/1, and even a couple of well-placed removal spells shrink it in real time. Variable stats were barely explored in this era (Lord of the Pit and the early dragons priced their bodies with downside text instead), and this is among the first creatures whose size is a pure function of your own board, the same counting logic that Nightmare, Maro, and later Wayfaring Temple would each turn in different directions. The lineage of the creature-as-board-mirror runs back through here.