Lady Evangela

Esper before Esper was a color identity: a three-color legend from the original multicolor set, with an activated ability whose cost spans two of her three colors. The design preserves the era's idea of what a Cleric should do at the table. Combat damage prevention, gated behind a tap and a colored payment, asking you to choose which attacker or blocker gets neutralized each turn. The mana cost on the ability is the giveaway: white and black together do the work, while the blue in her identity is paid for once at cast and never asked for again. That split (identity colors that exceed activation colors) is a Legends signature, a design vocabulary the game moved away from as it tightened the relationship between a card's color identity and the colors it actually uses. The effect itself is also of its time. Modern damage prevention has largely been replaced by tapping, exiling, or fight effects; a repeatable "prevent all combat damage from target creature" reads now as a slow, defensive lock rather than an answer, and the 1/2 body confirms she was never meant to win a race. What she represents is the moment the game first tried to encode a saintly protector in mechanical terms, before the toolbox for that fantasy existed.