Scavenging Scarab

A four-mana 3/3 that surrenders the option to block was, by the standards of its era, a fair-to-soft creature whose lone clause subtracts a role rather than granting one. The body is a standard-to-below rate even before the restriction, so "can't block" is not buying a discount; it is a flavor-justified confirmation that this Insect was only ever meant to swing. That is the whole transaction. This is the discard pile of early-2000s common design: a plain beater with a single line of text that docks value instead of adding it, no synergy hook, no tribal payoff, no second axis to build around. It sat in an artifact-heavy small set obsessed with indestructibility, and into that environment Wizards seeded a handful of unglamorous black bodies whose drawbacks gestured at aggression without doing much to enable it. Worth knowing as a clean specimen of the period's costing instincts (modest body, narrowed freedom) rather than for anything it accomplished. The card is a baseline, not a builder.