Duskrider Falcon

Protection from black is the entire pitch, and the body underneath it is almost beside the point: nobody is buying a two-mana 1/1 flier for its stats. The keyword does four things at once on a single creature: black creatures cannot block it, black removal cannot target it, black sources deal it no damage, and black auras slide off. Flying already makes it evasive across the board; protection from black narrows that evasion into a specific guarantee, turning a body the opponent might trade into or chump into a clock they have to answer with off-color tools. The cost of that breadth is its conditionality: a color-specific shield does nothing when there is no black across the table, and it is exactly the lever early sets pulled to keep small fliers in check. Print enough variants pointed at each color and protection becomes a metagame dial rather than a flat stat bump, which is why the keyword keeps landing on bodies that would otherwise be forgettable. The Falcon is one of the cleanest cases of the pattern: a baseline flier whose relevance is governed entirely by whether the opponent is casting black spells. Worth noting where the protection stops, too: it guards the creature, not the controller, so a black edict that forces a sacrifice still takes the Falcon like anything else. The keyword answers targeted interaction, not the player-targeting effects that route around it.