Cavalry Master

Flanking was a combat keyword built around a single image: mounted Knights who punish the foot soldier reckless enough to step into their path. On its own, one instance shaves a point off a blocker without flanking, enough to discourage chump-blocks from small creatures but rarely the thing that wins a combat. Bundling the keyword-granting clause onto a 3/3 body that itself flanks gives the mechanic the lord it never had. Because each instance of flanking triggers separately, a creature that already flanks now carries two, dropping blockers without flanking by -2/-2 before damage is assigned. Pointed at a pile of small flankers, the arithmetic skews fast: a board of marginal bodies becomes nearly unblockable by anything that isn't oversized or flanking itself. The deeper trouble is that flanking always wanted to be a payoff and almost never got to be one. It appeared on dozens of commons and uncommons as flavor texture, useful in a single block step but never a deck's reason to exist, and it was scattered across creatures rather than concentrated in any one tribe. This card is the retroactive justification for assembling that pile, an anthem for a tribe the keyword was sprinkled over instead of built into. The result is more interesting as a design artifact than as a deck's engine: a lord printed to dignify a mechanic that had spent its whole life as set dressing.