Deft Duelist

Shroud on an attacker reads like a clean deal until you sit with what the keyword actually costs you. A 2/1 first striker for two trades up against most early creatures and survives the swing back, which is a real rate for the price. But shroud is a double-edged keyword: it locks your opponent's removal out at the cost of cutting the creature off from your own toolbox entirely. No combat trick to push the last point of damage, no aura to make it a real threat, no equipment to patch the fragile single toughness. That is the deliberate tension in the design: the body is built to attack alone and unaided, and the keyword enforces it by refusing every helping hand you might offer. Hexproof, which arrived later to do similar protective work, was the cleaner instrument precisely because it let the controller keep buffing and saving the creature while only the opponent was locked out. Shroud here is the older, blunter tool, and it asks the deck around it to win on the strength of a hard-to-kill clock that has nothing but first strike and resilience to get there: no evasion, no way to grow, just a body that keeps showing up to the combat step and refusing to die to a removal spell.