Ekundu Griffin

Flying paired with first strike on a 2/2 is a defensive math problem dressed up as a creature: it can block an attacking flyer of equal or smaller size and walk away clean, because its damage resolves before the blocked creature gets to swing back. The body is too small to win races on its own and the rate is flat by the standards that followed, but the keyword pairing does something a vanilla 3/3 flyer cannot, which is trade up rather than trade even. Stapling evasion to a combat keyword on a four-mana common was considered a fair deal in its day, and it reads now less as a card with a story than as a tidy illustration of how two keywords resolve against each other in the combat step. The role it fills is the unglamorous flying speed bump in white's curve: a body that holds the air and threatens to eat whatever crosses it, without demanding a card in return.