General Thunderbolt Ross
Battalion has always wanted a payoff cheap enough to lead the curve rather than cap it, and here it is crammed into the smallest possible frame: a one-mana legend meant to be swinging on the turn a wide board first comes online. The mechanic itself is over a decade old, a go-wide reward that fires when the carrier and two friends attack together, but earlier holders of the keyword tended to be midsized creatures that arrived after a board was already assembled. Putting the trigger on a 1/1 inverts the sequencing. This is the card you play first and build around, not the one you deploy to close a game you were already winning. First strike does quiet work on the body: it keeps the little legend relevant in the earliest attacks and lets it survive combat against fragile blockers, though the +1/+0 it hands the attackers comes without that protection, so the buffed attackers still trade on the usual schedule. The cost of the design is obvious enough: a 1/1 legend dies to almost anything and does nothing in an empty-board stall. The reward is a lord-style anthem available at the very bottom of the curve to a white weenie deck that never had to pay lord prices for it. It rewards flooding the board wide and swinging in numbers, exactly the axis white aggro has always wanted its leaders to reinforce.
