Steadfast Guard

Vigilance on a French vanilla white two-drop is the most honest version of a defensive aggro creature: it attacks for two and stays back to block for two, asking nothing of the rest of your deck. That double-duty body is the whole proposition, and the double-white cost is what tethers it to a dedicated white shell rather than letting it splash into any board. The Rebel tag is the one wrinkle that mattered in its day, slotting this into the recruiter chain that defined white and black during its era: a creature you could tutor onto the battlefield with the searcher effects of the time, valued less for its stats than for being a Rebel you could fetch when you needed a body that would not tap out of the red zone. Stripped of that tribal context, what is left is a clean teaching example of how vigilance reshapes the attack-step math: it deletes the tension between pressing the offense and holding the fort, so a single creature covers both halves of a turn cycle. The rate is plain by modern standards, but the design is legible, and that legibility is the point.