Aven Smokeweaver

Protection from red, stapled to an evasive body, is one of Magic's oldest defensive trades: you accept a creature that is unremarkable on rate (a 2/3 flier for four mana is a fair statline, not a thrilling one) in exchange for total immunity to a single color's removal, blocking, and damage. In a flying Bird Soldier, that protection does double duty. The flying makes it a clock; the protection from red makes it a clock that mono-red simply cannot answer in combat, since the keyword voids both burn aimed at it and any red attacker hoping to trade. The design logic is targeted hate dressed as a maindeckable creature: against a red deck this attacks profitably forever, while against anything else it is just a modest flier. That conditionality is the whole bargain of color protection. It costs nothing when it matters and contributes little when it does not, and the printed rate reflects a body priced to be reasonable even when the protection is dead weight. It belongs to the long line of blue fliers that exist mostly to wall and outpace red aggression, the role white usually fills with first strikers and lifegain but that blue occasionally borrows when it wants the evasion attached.