Anaba Bodyguard

First strike on a defensive body is a venerable template: it makes a creature that wins the fights it should lose and survives the fights it should win, trading up in the red zone by virtue of landing the first blow. The execution is where the era shows. This is the Anaba Minotaurs' combat piece, the closest thing that tribal-flavored block had to a coherent aggressive theme, and at four mana for a 2/3 it was costed to a power level the rest of Magic immediately walked past. Red was already getting sharper aggression at lower rates, and a body this size at this cost did not clear the bar those cards set. The card reads less as a strategy than as a snapshot: an early-era tribal experiment whose creatures were priced for a metagame that never had to fight anything fast. The first-strike-on-defense chassis is sound design that has been reprinted, in spirit, dozens of times since at better rates. This is the respectable midcurve version of it, honest and on-color, and entirely a product of when it was made.