Alesha's Vanguard

Dash exists to change what a body costs you in board commitment. A three-power beater with no evasion and no enters-the-battlefield trigger is a liability the moment it lands: cast at full price, it sits on an empty crackback waiting for a sorcery-speed sweeper on your opponent's turn. The dash cost rewrites that exchange. Pay the alternative cost and the creature arrives with haste, swings for three, then returns to hand at the next end step, so a board wipe on the following turn finds nothing to hit. The trade is permanence for tempo: you never leave a static target for the mass answers built to punish committed attackers, but you also never build a presence that survives to your next upkeep. The safety is real but partial. A dashed attacker is still on the battlefield through combat and can be killed by instant-speed removal, blocked, or answered in response to the return trigger; what it dodges is the slower, sorcery-speed clocks that reward patience. The decision every turn is reading the open mana and deciding which risk you can eat: a fragile permanent that might get swept, or a poke that spends your whole turn and leaves nothing behind. Within a mono-black aggressive shell, this is a low-rarity beater built to grind small recurring increments out of an opponent who has to keep spending real removal to stop the same three points.