Benalish Knight

The design here is the marriage of flash and first strike, two keywords that look ordinary apart and become a tempo tool together. Flash means the body never sits on the battlefield begging to be answered before it does its job; it appears in response to an attack, blocks at instant speed, and bends combat math thanks to first strike. Swing a small creature into open white mana and this can ambush it: the first striker deals its damage first, the attacker dies before it ever strikes back, and the Knight survives untouched. Against a larger creature the trade is less clean (a 3/3 eats the two first-strike damage, lives, then kills the blocker in the regular damage step), but even then the opponent's chosen attack costs them more than it cost you to answer it. That is the trick the card converts: the defender normally suffers the attacker's structural advantage (the attacker picks the matchup), and flash plus first strike lets you pick the moment instead while adding a combat edge in the same motion. As a beater it is modest, vanilla-adjacent in most attacks, but it taxes the opponent's combat decisions even while it sits in hand. The combination has been reprinted often enough that flash and first strike on a small white body reads as a recognizable Knight template rather than a one-off.