Angelic Curator
Built for the artifact-saturated metagame that Urza's block created, this is a designer's answer to a specific problem: a small white flier whose protection clause turns it into a unilateral counter to artifact-based aggression and defense alike. Protection from artifacts does several jobs at once here: it cannot be blocked by artifact creatures, takes no damage from artifact sources, cannot be targeted by artifact spells or abilities, and cannot have an artifact Equipment attached to it. In a block where colorless threats defined the texture of board states, a two-mana evasive body that those threats simply could not interact with was a deliberate pressure valve, not just a flavor of hatebear. The flying keeps it relevant on offense even when the protection is dead; the protection keeps it relevant on defense when the opponent's whole plan is metal. The minimal body is what licenses the breadth: with a 1/1, the controller is asked to leverage evasion and immunity rather than combat math, which is exactly the constrained design that lets a narrow keyword ride a cheap creature without warping anything. It is a clean piece of sideboard-style hate folded into a maindeck-legal creature, the sort of targeted answer Wizards reaches for when a mechanic (here, artifacts) starts to dominate a block's identity.

