Mirri

Vanguard let you skip the deck slot entirely: instead of drawing into a card, you chose an avatar before the game began and inherited a persistent rules-altering effect that ran the whole table. This avatar's gift is a quiet but structural piece of fixing, letting any basic land you control produce a color of your choice when it taps. The effect rewrites the premise of the manabase: run a monocolor pile of basics and still cast anything, with the color screw that defined the era's games simply lifted off the board. It is a fixing engine attached to no card, no mana cost, and no deck space, the kind of unbounded passive power Vanguard could afford to hand out precisely because the avatars never sat in your seventy-five. The series never became a sanctioned constructed format, and the avatars stayed inside their own casual ecosystem, so the card reads today as a curiosity rather than a tool. It is best understood as a stress test of resource development: how far a single passive effect can bend the rules of mana production without breaking anything, when there is no tournament economy underneath it to break.