Hand of Honor

Built to hose a single color, and unusually pointed about which one. Protection from black on a white two-drop means it dodges much of the era's premier removal package: edicts can still force it to be sacrificed when it's the only or chosen creature, but targeted black kills, black combat damage, and black auras simply slide off. Against an opponent leaning on those tools, this is a 2/2 that attacks unanswered and blocks with impunity, its bushido turning every contested swing into a 3/3 trade it tends to win. The design tension is precision: protection from black is among the most lopsided abilities a body this cheap can carry, devastating into a black-heavy opponent and inert against everyone else. That narrowness is the cost. Where Samurai of the Pale Curtain and other white two-drops of the same lineage offered broad utility, this one was built as a scalpel, a creature whose entire value proposition is the matchup it was printed to beat. The bushido trigger is the small reward for committing it to combat anyway, nudging the rate toward respectable in the games where the protection text reads as blank. It is a creature defined by the single problem it solves: maximally efficient against the thing it answers, honest filler against everything else.