Devoted Retainer

Bushido at one mana is the cheapest the keyword ever got, and it shows exactly what the mechanic was and was not built to do. The trigger fires on both sides of combat: this 1/1 swells to a 2/2 whether it attacks into a block or stops a creature itself. What it cannot do is intimidate before the dice are cast, because the bonus only materializes once blockers and attackers are locked in. The body sells a favorable trade it does not actually have until combat is committed. An opponent has to treat every swing into it as a possible walk into two power, and every block from it as the loss of a two-power creature, but that deterrence is psychological math rather than a board state the controller can point to in advance: the bonus is real once it triggers, lasting through the rest of the turn rather than evaporating the moment combat resolves, but it has to be earned in a fight first, and an idle Retainer is just a 1/1 until the next one. That is the samurai conceit made mechanically literal, honor as escalating commitment in a duel, the creature weakest standing apart and strongest only once it has entered the fray. As a piece of early white aggression it sits at the floor of what a single mana could ask of an opponent's combat decisions: a narrower job than a modern one-drop expects, but a clean and self-consistent one.