Maraxus

The aggressive end of the Vanguard design space, where the avatar's whole contribution is a flat anthem that lifts every creature you control by a single point of power and never expires. Vanguard, introduced in 1997, gave players a persistent identity for the game: a card that lived outside the deck, adjusted your opening hand size and starting life total, and granted a passive effect that applied for the entire match rather than a single turn. The line was a closed system, never constructed-legal in the tournament sense, distributed as promotional pieces for casual multiplayer and the early organized-play scene. What the format prototyped is the idea that a player could bring a rules-altering object to the table that the opponent could not answer, the same conceptual seed that planeswalkers, companions, and other from-outside-the-battlefield effects would later grow from. The buff here is deliberately one-dimensional: power only, no toughness, no evasion, nothing that would let a board-wide pump warp the math of combat into something the design wanted to avoid. It scales with how wide you go and rewards flooding the board, but it stops exactly there. It is a snapshot of an experiment asking what the game looks like when one effect is simply always on, and answering as conservatively as the question allows.