Leather Armor

A single mana buys not a bigger threat but a cheaper insurance policy. The +0/+1 barely registers; the whole value proposition is the ward , priced at zero to equip and free to move turn after turn. That combination is the interesting part. Most protective Equipment charges an equip cost to relocate the shield, which makes shuffling a shell around expensive. Free equip lets the tax travel with whatever creature matters most on a given turn, while the once-per-turn restriction keeps that mobility from becoming a board-wide protection blanket. Ward is a modest tax on its own, trivially paid by an opponent who badly wants a target gone, and the card makes no pretense otherwise. Its real work is against the free or nearly-free interaction that tempo decks lean on, where forcing an extra mana out of a spot-removal spell or a bounce effect can strand it a beat too late. Read plainly, it is a low-commitment protective wrapper against a single cheap answer, engineered so the wrapper costs almost nothing to keep on and almost nothing to slide from one body to another. The flavor is exactly what the name promises: light armor, not a breastplate, a hedge rather than a fortress.