Ballynock Cohort

The conditional that swings this body is the most reliable kind of payoff white aggro asks for: a flat, binary check that wants nothing more than a single other white creature on the table. Meet it, and you have a 2/2 first striker that becomes a 3/3 first striker for three mana; fail it, and you are back to the 2/2 floor that still trades with most two-drops. The buff is purely self-directed, which is the elegant part of the design. It does not anthem the team or care how wide the board goes; it asks one yes-or-no question about the company it keeps and then rewards keeping any at all. That makes it nearly impossible to turn off in a deck built entirely from white creatures, where the +1/+1 is on essentially every turn it matters. A 3/3 first striker is the body that punishes the red zone in both directions: on defense it eats attackers its size or smaller without taking a scratch back, and on offense first strike means blockers of equal size simply die before they connect. The whole package is a single creature that fights above its slot the moment it has a peer, with a downside that amounts to little more than a temporary shrink when the board is empty. Plain in its parts, sharp the instant a second white body shows up beside it.