Karoo Meerkat

A 2/1 with protection from blue is a hate-bear in the oldest sense of the term: a creature designed not to win on its own but to be miserable for one specific opponent to deal with. Protection from blue functions once the body is on the battlefield, where it cannot be targeted by blue spells, cannot be blocked by blue creatures, and shrugs off damage from blue sources. That collapses an entire suite of blue removal and combat interaction (bounce, targeted removal, tempo blockers) into dead cards. The catch is that protection does nothing while the creature is still on the stack; a blue control deck can simply counter it before it ever resolves, which forces the permission deck to spend the answer green wanted to drain out of it anyway. The design logic is pure color-pie warfare. Mirage's protection cycle handed each color a cheap aggressive body that walked past its philosophical enemy, and green's job was to pressure the permission deck that wanted to durdle behind countermagic. The 2/1 is built to attack, not block: all offense, a clock the opponent has to find a non-blue answer for or take. That narrowness is the whole point. Against anything that is not blue, it is a vanilla green two-drop with soft toughness; against the right opponent, it becomes a creature their deck is structurally unequipped to kill once it sticks. It is sideboard philosophy printed years before sideboard philosophy was articulated, back when color-hosing lived in the main set rather than the margins.