Soul Shepherd

A 2/1 for two with a lifegain spigot bolted on, built for an era when graveyard recursion was still a novelty and the design instinct was to charge real costs for small returns. The activated ability asks for a lot relative to what it gives: a white mana plus a permanently exiled creature card, all for a single point of life. That exchange rate explains why the card never found a home beyond casual lifegain piles; the engine drains your own yard faster than it pads your total, and the body is the part actually pulling weight. What it represents is the early, cautious version of a design lever Wizards would refine for years: turning the graveyard into a resource you spend rather than refill. Later cards made the same trade at a rate that justified the dig; this one priced the conversion so high that it functions mostly as a vanilla two-drop with a button you rarely press. The Cleric type line and the lifegain framing point at a tribal-aristocrat fantasy that the card itself cannot support, since it lacks any way to recur the creatures it eats or convert the life into pressure.