Knight's Pledge

The flat +2/+2 Aura is the oldest math in the game, and it has been printing at this exact rate for as long as Auras have existed: two mana, one of them white, for a static stat bump and nothing else. It keeps reappearing because it is the control point against which every more interesting Aura gets priced. Give one a keyword, an enters-the-battlefield bonus, a draw-on-removal clause, and a designer is implicitly asking whether the upside justifies stepping off this baseline. This card does not step off it. The trade-off it accepts is the one all naked stat-Auras accept: card disadvantage and tempo risk, since a single removal spell on the enchanted creature answers two cards at once. That liability is exactly why white aggressive shells have largely migrated to Equipment and to creatures that buff each other on the board, which do not evaporate when the host dies. What it represents, then, is less a tool than a yardstick: the "make a creature bigger, full stop" effect with no rider to obscure how thin it has become at competitive rates. It exists so the rest of the Aura design space has a floor to measure against.