Meng Huo's Horde

A 4/5 for five mana that does nothing but stand there is a vanilla body, and that is precisely the point of where it sits in design history. Cards like this exist as the baseline against which everything with text gets measured: a green five-drop with no keyword, no enters-the-battlefield trigger, and no activated ability is the control sample, the rate a designer prices the interesting cards against. The body itself is solid for the era it comes from: five toughness blocks most of what a board of mid-sized creatures throws at it, and four power trades up or attacks into open ground without embarrassment. But the absence of any second axis is the whole story. Nothing here rewards sequencing, nothing chains into a turn, nothing punishes an opponent for tapping out. It is a wall of bodies (the flavor of a horde leaning entirely on the art and the flavor text to carry the name) that lives or dies on whether 4/5 for five is enough on its own. In nearly every context worth discussing, it is not, which is exactly why vanilla green beaters at this slot are the cards that get cut first when a set's commons get sorted into playables and chaff. A useful artifact of how the curve was tuned in its time, and little more.