Stone Docent

A 3/1 for two is aggro-body arithmetic: high power, negligible defense, the kind of stat line that trades down in combat and gets outclassed the moment the board stalls. What keeps this card relevant past its first swing is the graveyard clause. Once it dies (or gets pitched), a single white mana buys two life and a surveil at sorcery speed, activated from the yard with exile as the cost. That exile cost is the balancing detail: because activating the ability removes the card, it fires exactly once, so this is a one-shot smoothing engine rather than a recursive loop, and it never overstays in a graveyard-matters shell the way a repeatable outlet would. The design is a body-plus-afterlife split. The front half wants to attack early; the back half wants to be a dead card that still owes you something later, feeding lifegain and self-mill payoffs without asking for a card slot of its own. It belongs to a template that has quietly matured over the years: cheap creatures whose real value is the small, self-contained utility they leave behind in the graveyard. The surveil does double duty, both filtering a draw and restocking the yard for whatever counts the cards down there. None of it is loud, which is the whole design intent: the card overdelivers on a two-mana investment across two separate phases of the game, then leaves the stage.