Shu Soldier-Farmers
A relic of the era when life gain was a creature's whole reason to exist, this is a five-mana 2/4 that hands you four life as it enters and asks nothing further. The math explains why this body of work fell out of fashion: a one-time four-point lifegain trigger costs as much mana as several burn spells deal in damage, but does nothing to affect the board beyond a defensive wall, and the modern white roster pairs that lifegain with payoffs (a drain on each gain, a token per point, a creature that grows). Here the gain is the payoff, full stop, which is exactly the design that aged out as the game learned that incidental life is rarely the resource a deck is short on. The 2/4 frame is honest about its intent: a blocker that buys a couple of turns and a small life cushion, built to slow an aggressive opponent rather than to ever close a game. It survives as a curiosity from a time when "gain 4 life" was considered a fair rate to attach to a creature, and as a reminder of how narrowly white's early defensive toolkit was conceived before lifegain became an engine input rather than an end in itself.
