Righteous Charge

A board-wide buff for three mana that asks nothing in return, built for an audience that, by the Portal sets' design, was expected to never buy another Magic product. The Portal line stripped the game down to teach the turn structure to first-time players, and the most telling absence is the instant: nearly everything in early Portal resolved at sorcery speed, so there was no countermagic-style ambush to fear and no off-turn interaction to plan around. That context is what makes the generosity here legible. A team pump that swings a whole board upward would normally carry a drawback or a steeper cost; this one carries neither, because the design budget that would fund a restriction went instead to keeping the card simple enough to read off a first rulebook. The effect lands a full step ahead of combat by its nature (it is a sorcery, played before attackers are declared), which suits a card meant to demonstrate the alpha-strike rather than reward the trick. What gives Righteous Charge its identity is not its words, which are about as plain as a pump spell gets, but the rules subset it was printed into: a Magic deliberately missing its sharpest edges, where a buff this open could exist without warping anything, because the format around it had been sanded smooth on purpose.