It seems to me that making this an instant was just a bad idea, but the card was a bad idea anyhow, especially at the time, where they were experimenting with mana and making tons of mana was just par for the course, which made the whole thing much worse
Dethrone is fine, and it gives you something useful to do with the guy
The raw card advantage this unassuming little Soldier generates will push you over the hump in stalled battlefield states and steal wins out from under objectively more powerful cards
If youre going all in on vampire-typal strategies, you have plenty of synergy cards
Butstill, you get that extra combat phase, which you might just be able to take advantage of
Ive excluded banned cards like Griselbrand as well