Water Elemental

A 5/4 for five mana with no evasion, no flash, and no text below the stat line: in 1993 that was a finisher worth building toward, and blue got to have it. Water Elemental was the heavyweight of Alpha's elemental cycle (Air, Earth, Fire, Water, all at uncommon), each one priced to its color's identity and meant to anchor a deck's late game. For a stretch of early Magic, this was simply what a blue deck did with its fifth turn when it could not counter your spell or bounce your creature: untap a fat body and start swinging. What marks the card as a relic is not the rate (5/4 for five is still a fair body) but the absence of any rider. Modern blue creatures at this cost carry two or three lines of text justifying their place in the color, because blue's share of raw combat stats has been steadily traded away for interaction over thirty years of design. Water Elemental carries no such justification, because back then the body was the justification. It now reads as a calibration point: the vanilla blue beater against which every repricing of mana value, stats, and abilities can be measured, and the reference a developer reaches for whenever the question of how big a textless blue creature is allowed to be comes back around.