Starlight

Lifegain that does nothing unless your opponent is playing the scary undead deck: that is the entire pitch here, and it is a remarkably honest piece of beginner instruction. Portal's design vocabulary was deliberately narrow, built to teach new players that colors mean something, and this card encodes that lesson directly into its rules text. The payoff is hardcoded to one specific color (black creatures, no choice involved), so the spell only swings when an opponent has committed to that color on the battlefield. That makes it a sideboard answer dressed up as a maindeck spell, years before the target audience would ever build a sideboard. In the mirror it is blank; against most of the color pie it is blank; against exactly one archetype the designers assumed a beginner would recognize, it gains a windfall scaled to how hard that opponent has leaned into black. The lesson it teaches is to read the board first: notice the threat, then notice that one of your cards is built to punish it. Strip away the training-wheels framing and the bones are pure metagame-tax design, the kind of color-pinpointed effect later sets would push to instant speed, staple to a body, or fold into a modal choice rather than sell as a standalone two-mana sorcery. The card is more interesting as a window into how the designers thought a new player should learn to size an answer than as anything you would ever cast on purpose.