Witch's Familiar

A 2/3 frog with nothing under the type line: no death trigger, no graveyard hook, no ability of any kind. The whole of it is three mana for a body that blocks well above its weight, trading with most early aggressive creatures and surviving a fair number of them. That puts it in the long tradition of core-set vanilla commons, the filler that fills out a creature curve and gives a deck a wall to stand behind while it sets up. The toughness is the only number that matters here: a 2/3 stops two-power attackers cold and demands a real removal spell or a third point of power to push through, the kind of speed bump early-era common design leaned on to slow a race without warping it. There is no archetype to slot it into and no engine to build around; the design brief was a defensive black creature at a clean rate, and that is what it delivers. Honest about what it is, which is more than can be said for a lot of cards that try to dress up the same job.