Keldon Halberdier

A 4/1 for five mana is a body almost nobody wants on the front of the card: too expensive for the rate, too fragile to anchor a board, and first strike alone does not save a creature this far behind the curve. Suspend rewrites the math. Pay a single red on an early turn, exile it with four time counters, and the body arrives with haste exactly when your hand has emptied out, swinging for four before anyone gets a turn to react. That red was spent on a turn you had nothing else to do with it, so the only real cost is the four-turn wait, and the haste clause refunds that wait in a single attack step rather than handing you another summoning-sick body to defend. First strike does its work here precisely because the creature is attacking into open territory: a 4/1 alpha-striking past a freshly-tapped board kills blockers with four or less toughness before they swing back, so the fragile body is rarely the liability the rate suggests. It is a clean read on the suspend idea, which trades immediacy for discount on a fixed schedule, and the worse a card looks at full cost, the more that discount is doing. Casting it for one red four turns early is a red player's bet that the game will still be live when the counters run out, with the haste guaranteeing the payoff lands the moment it does.