Hand of Cruelty

Built as a black answer to white, with all the bluntness that target implies. Protection from white is the load-bearing clause: white creatures cannot block it or be assigned to it, white burn and pacification cannot touch it, and most of the color's premium removal slides off entirely. Against a white deck it is a body that simply cannot be answered through combat or the color's usual interaction. Bushido 1, by contrast, does its work everywhere the protection does not. Against blue, red, or green, where the card is just a 2/2 with a triggered combat bump, the swell to a 3/3 on the turn it blocks or is blocked is the only thing keeping it relevant in a fight: it lets the body trade up against creatures it has no immunity to. The two abilities cover disjoint ground. Protection handles one color completely; Bushido salvages the combat math against the rest. This is the older school of color-hosing creature design, where a body's relevance was tuned almost entirely to a single matchup rather than spread across the board, and the cost of that precision shows the moment the opponent is not playing white: a fine but unremarkable two-drop whose marquee ability reads as blank text. A scalpel against white-heavy fields, ordinary fodder anywhere else.