Cavalry Drillmaster

The enters-the-battlefield trigger here is doing two jobs, and the second one is why the card earns its slot over a plain two-drop. Everyone reads the +2/+0 first, but first strike is what turns the buff from a stat bump into a soft removal spell: hand it to a creature that will connect in combat, and the recipient kills what it touches before taking damage back. That makes the body almost incidental. Because this is a creature without flash, the trigger fires when you play it at sorcery speed in a main phase, so the play is not an instant-speed combat ambush; it is a pre-combat commitment. You resolve the entry before the declare-attackers step, then swing knowing which block turns lethal, or which attacker you can push through. The payoff wants a creature that will fight this turn: the Drillmaster has no haste, so buffing itself on the turn it enters does nothing until it can attack, by which point the +2/+0 and first strike have expired. The payoff sits in the moment it hits the battlefield and the combat that follows, nowhere else. Drop it the turn you alpha-strike, give first strike to your biggest attacker, and a clean block becomes a one-sided kill. Stapling a combat trick to a creature is an old idea; the specific pairing of a power boost with first strike, gated behind a sorcery-speed body, is what makes it read as evasion enabler and removal at once.