Pillaging Horde

A clean illustration of how early Magic priced a beatable body. Five power for four mana was aggressive for its era, so the rate gets paid for at the door: the creature enters with a coin-flip-adjacent tax, where a random discard is the cost of keeping it on the battlefield. The friction lives entirely in that entry trigger, and it cuts both ways depending on what your hand holds. With a full grip, the random discard might pitch your best spell; with a completely empty hand, the sacrifice clause simply fires, leaving you with nothing for your four mana. The whole design lives in that squeeze: you want to play it when your hand is thin enough that the discard costs little but full enough that you still have a card to throw away. Templating like this belongs to a set written to onboard new players, with no instant-speed tricks and no hidden corners, and this is a representative artifact of that goal: a fatty whose only complexity is a single drawback that turns hand management into a real decision. Later designs would refine discard-as-cost into madness payoffs and reanimator enablers; here it sits in its rawest form, an undirected tax that rewards nothing beyond putting a large body into play one turn early.