Keeper of Kookus

A study in how narrow protection can be: a one-mana 1/1 whose entire kit is a repeatable shield against its own color. For a single red mana it gains protection from red until end of turn, which reads like a parochial joke until you remember when it was printed. This belongs to the brief era of color-hosing creatures whose abilities keyed off a specific opposing color rather than a card type or mechanic, and red was the color that mattered: red aggro defined whole environments, and red-on-red combat was a real bottleneck. Protection from red turns off the red burn pointed at it, lets it slip past red blockers in combat, and shrugs off the red pingers that otherwise mow down X/1 bodies. The catch is the same as the pitch. Against any other color the ability does nothing, so the card's value swings entirely on whether the opponent is also leaning on red. Note what the design does and does not do: it makes this one 1/1 untouchable to red, but it taxes nothing the opponent is trying to do. The opposing plan is unchanged; only this creature's survival odds shift. That is the older model of countering aggression, and the narrower one. Modern hatebears restrict what an opponent can do; this one just makes a single body immune to the exact deck it was built to dodge, and only that deck.