D'Avenant Archer

The pinger archetype in its archer dressing. The tap-for-one-damage ability is one of white's oldest combat tools, and the restriction to attacking and blocking creatures is what holds the whole thing in check: no shooting down planeswalkers, no picking off players, no clearing a board of untapped utility creatures. The damage only flows through combat, which keeps the card a defensive piece rather than an unrestricted value engine. The clean use is reactive: tap to shoot a wounded attacker or blocker that combat has already brought into range, finishing what another creature started, or pick off an undersized one-toughness attacker before it ever connects. The 1/2 body is built to sit back and repeat that loop, the two toughness surviving a return shot from most one-power pingers. The lineage runs through Prodigal Sorcerer on the blue side and into the "tap for 1" white commons that followed: the combat-only clause is precisely what lets white have a version of the effect at all, since unconditional pinging has always lived in blue and red. Note too that the damage here is marked, not subtracted: shooting an attacker stacks its point with whatever combat deals, so a blocker that would otherwise trade can survive and kill instead. A tidy piece of early color-pie carpentry, and a reminder that much of white's defensive identity was settled well before the modern design vocabulary existed and has barely moved since.