Horizon Drake

Protection from lands is the kind of keyword string that reads like an error until you trace what it actually answers. The era that produced this drake was thick with manlands and land-based aggression: creature-lands that swung in, lands that pinged, lands that wanted to block. A flier with protection from lands cannot be blocked by any of them, cannot be targeted by their abilities, and cannot be damaged by them in combat. That is the narrow, specific job built into an evasive 3/1 body: a clock that the most relevant defensive land of its day simply could not interact with. The protection clause is also the cost that keeps the rate honest in reverse; against a deck with no relevant lands, it is pure flavor, and you are paying for a fragile flier that dies to almost everything. The toughness of 1 is the real tax here, leaving the body vulnerable to any incidental damage, any sweeper, any blocker that does get to swing back. This is a self-protecting attacker pointed at a single, unusual axis, not a tax on what the opponent can do: it asks nothing of their game plan, it only refuses to engage their lands. The keyword is a quiet reminder of how literal early protection-from-a-type designs could get: not protection from a color or a card type in the usual sense, but from lands specifically, a permanent type that rarely fights back at all.