Liu Bei, Lord of Shu
The whole historical-fiction set that produced this design ran on cards that read your other cards, and the oath of brotherhood at its center is the clearest example. The +2/+2 is a static buff conditioned on controlling Guan Yu, Sainted Warrior or Zhang Fei, Fierce Warrior: the three sworn brothers of the Three Kingdoms narrative, mechanically bound so that Liu Bei is a 2/4 alone and a 4/6 the moment one of his brothers stands on the battlefield beside him. Horsemanship is the period-flavored evasion keyword the whole set used in place of flying, an isolated mechanic that can only be blocked by other horsemen, which in practice means almost nothing blocks it. That turns the swing into a 4/6 evasive beater into the payoff the design steers toward. What is striking is how literally the rules text serves the story: most legends of this vintage gestured at flavor through art and name, but this one encodes a famous loyalty oath as an ongoing condition, a bonus that exists exactly as long as a named ally shares the table. It is narrative-as-mechanic from an era when that was rare, and it remains a curiosity precisely because the condition names specific cards rather than a creature type, tying its ceiling to a tiny, hand-built family rather than any tribe you could assemble at scale.
