Knight of Stromgald

Protection from white does the heavy lifting here, not the body: it blocks white's small attackers all day, walks past white's targeted removal, and shrugs off the disabling auras white leaned on in that era. The fragile 2/1 is the deliberate concession; everything else in the game still answers it, and the two mana-sink abilities tax the same black mana your other spells want. But against white specifically, those sinks turn a soft creature into the body that closes the matchup. Pump it once for first strike to win combat against anything its size; pour mana into the +1/+0 to push more damage through against a color that already cannot block or kill it. This is one of the color-hosed creatures Wizards printed when protection was a primary lever for enforcing the rivalries on the pie, the same design instinct that produced White Knight as its black-versus-white mirror. Read that way, the card is less a creature than a thesis statement about how black was supposed to feel when it sat across from white: cheap, slightly desperate, and built to grind out the one fight the color pie wanted you to have.