Geist of Saint Traft
A clock disguised as a 2/2. The body is almost beside the point; what matters is that hexproof slams the door on targeted removal, leaving an opponent to answer the geist with a board wipe, a real blocker, or nothing at all. While they decide, the attack trigger does the math that makes the card terrifying: six damage a swing, four of it on a 4/4 flier that arrives already tapped and attacking, so it never has to survive a turn cycle to connect. The exile clause on the Angel does the throttling: one flier per combat step, every step, never an accumulating army. The trade the design accepts is the legend's own skin. Hexproof keeps the geist untouchable by spot removal, but a 2/2 with no evasion blocks badly and dies to anything 2/3 or bigger, so an opponent who can leave a serious blocker up shuts the engine off through combat. The Angel is not untouchable either: it enters during declare attackers, so a flier or a chump on the defending side can still trade with it in the same combat. That gap, the unprotected creature powering both halves, is what kept the card from being oppressive. It handed blue-white a tempo plan it had long wanted: a threat shielded by countermagic rather than by enchant-and-pray auras. Deploy early, hold up interaction, and let the geist outrace whatever the opponent is trying to assemble.
