Prowling Nightstalker

The Nightstalker tribe was Portal's contribution to creature-type evasion, and this is the template stated plainly: a body that walks past anything that is not black. The design logic is borrowed from the old swampwalk school, where evasion is conditional on the opponent's board rather than on a fixed keyword, except here the trigger is color instead of land type. Against a deck with no black creatures, a 2/2 that connects every turn is a clock; against a mirror, or any opponent fielding black blockers, the ability does nothing at all. That swing is what the Portal evasion suite was after: simple, color-coded interaction legible at a glance, since these introductory products ran no instants and a deliberately trimmed vocabulary. The four-mana cost for a 2/2 reads as steep by later standards, but rate was never the brief; the line of text was. What the Nightstalkers represent is an early experiment in tying evasion to the opponent's choices rather than the attacker's stats, a thread Wizards would keep pulling in later mechanics that reward or punish board composition. The history here is modest, but it is a clean specimen of how the teaching products thought about combat math.