Veteran's Sidearm

A single point of power and a single point of toughness, moved for a mana at a time: this is the floor of the Equipment category, the rate against which every more ambitious piece of gear gets measured. No body rides along, no keyword is granted, no card drawn when it clips on. What it offers in exchange for being so plain is permanence and portability: the +1/+1 survives the death of whatever creature wears it, and the trivial equip cost lets it walk from a fallen attacker to the next body without much tempo lost. That is what makes it worth a slot for decks built on a stream of small creatures rather than one threat worth protecting. It lives in a long tradition of training-wheels Equipment: cheap, legible objects that teach the equip-and-reattach loop without asking the player to evaluate anything complicated. The single-point boost is exactly the increment that pushes a one-drop out of bad blocking math or lets two evenly matched creatures trade up in combat, and nothing more. It is filler by intent, the kind of common that rounds out a slow aggressive deck and asks no questions of the player holding it.