Kessig Wolf

A 3/1 in red is the classic glass cannon: enough power to demand a block, too little toughness to survive almost anything that bites back. The repeatable first-strike activation flips that math in combat. With the mana up, this attacker kills any blocker of three toughness or less before it connects, and walks away unscathed. Because the activation can be paid every turn the red mana is held open, the threat stays live attack after attack, which forces the defender to respect a profitable swing instead of chumping into it for free. That recurrence is the line between a beater that demands a removal spell and one that runs into the first good block. The real tension lives in the wolf's own fragility: leave the mana untapped and the attack is genuinely dangerous; spend it elsewhere and the same 3/1 dies to a stiff breeze. It is workmanlike aggressive design, a creature that rewards holding combat mana over dumping the hand, and that quietly asks the opponent to redo the arithmetic on every attack step.