Urza

The most decorated artificer in Dominaria's history, the planeswalker (in the old, lowercase sense, before the card type existed) whose machines defined an entire era of the storyline, sits here as a sluggish pinger: a repeatable mana sink that picks off small creatures or chips at a face one point at a time over many turns. The rate is deliberately unhurried, which suited a casual supplementary format that let players step into a persona rather than build a balanced card. The Vanguard line handed each player an avatar that tweaked the rules they sat down under and then layered on a single unique ability; the design brief was flavor and identity, not competitive parity. What makes this worth remembering is the slot it occupies in Magic's history: a 1997 snapshot of how Wizards thought about putting the storyline's protagonists into the player's chair, years before commanders and planeswalker cards gave that same instinct a permanent home on the battlefield. The format never became evergreen, but the idea underneath it (you are not just casting spells, you are someone in this story) eventually reshaped the game's most popular formats.