Seekers' Squire

The cleanest implementation explore ever got, and the card that taught everyone what the keyword actually does. Explore is a smoothing mechanic dressed as a growth mechanic: reveal a land off the top and it goes to your hand, reveal anything else and you get a permanent +1/+1 counter plus a card-selection decision (leave the card on top to draw next turn, or bin it). That second branch is the underrated half: an attacker in the making and a graveyard-fueling option folded into the same enter-the-battlefield trigger. A two-mana 1/2 that filters your draw and either grows or fixes your land drops is the kind of quiet early-game value black has always wanted, delivered here without a single condition or downside. Because the explore resolves once on entry, the counter is a one-time bonus rather than an engine, but that single point of growth is exactly what keeps the body relevant past the opening turns while the revealed lands keep the curve honest. It is the textbook version of a design that rewards a deck for caring about its top card without demanding any setup, which is why this two-drop became the friendliest face of the explore-matters archetype. Any deck built to trigger explore repeatedly starts its curve here, and the mechanic itself became the connective tissue for that shell: cards like Wildgrowth Walker pay you off for each explore, and this creature is the smoothest way to hand them one.