Auriok Champion
Protection from black and from red, stapled to a body that costs two white mana, is one of the cleanest hosers ever printed into a creature, because it is not a sideboard card pretending to be a threat: it is a permanent presence that happens to invalidate two of the most aggressive colors' entire interaction suites. Black removal and red burn both glance off entirely (Doom Blade cannot target it, burn cannot deal it damage), and the two damage-based archetypes that live and die on tempo simply cannot fight through it by normal means. That alone would make it a fixture; the lifegain rider is what turns it from a wall into a soft lock. The trigger fires whenever any other creature enters, yours or theirs, so a board built to attack you also pads your life total as it fills out, and a deck built to flood the board compounds the gain fast. The 1/1 frame is the cost: it trades into a single attacker, dies to a stiff breeze of non-black, non-red removal, and offers no clock of its own. But within its lane it is brutally lopsided, the kind of card that reads as a hatebear and plays as a hate-engine. White aggro and lifegain shells have leaned on it for exactly that asymmetry across eras, and nothing has quite replaced the specific combination of those two protections welded to a body that drips life off every creature that hits the table.


