Benalish Trapper

Tapping down a creature does not kill it, but it removes the creature from a turn cycle as surely as removal does: the attacker that cannot swing, the blocker that cannot block. This is the workhorse implementation of that idea, a repeatable tapper costed to be deployed early and used every turn thereafter. The constraint is the white-mana investment per activation, which keeps it honest in a way a free tap would not: choosing to neutralize one creature each turn means leaving mana up rather than developing the board, so the trapper is at its best as a defensive valve that buys time rather than a tempo engine that runs away with a game. The 1/2 body matters more than it reads, surviving the small pings and one-toughness blockers that would trade with a 1/1 and letting the ability keep firing across a long game. Tappers like this trace a long white tradition of soft, repeatable control that locks down threats without the red splash that burn demands or the black cost that edicts extract; the lineage runs from Master Decoy forward, and the format work is identical even when the rate shifts. What you are paying for is the option to say no to one creature, indefinitely, for the cost of holding up a single white source each turn.