Knight of the Mists

A flavor pun built into the rules. This is white's flanking keyword grafted onto a blue body, but the entry trigger is where the design earns its name: a Knight that arrives hunting other Knights, with an optional blue payment as the escape hatch. The structure is a kicker-in-reverse, a mechanic Visions was experimenting with throughout the set. You do not pay to add an effect; you pay to suppress one. Leave the mana unspent and the Knight has to destroy a target Knight outright, regeneration locked off, which means it will gladly eat itself if no other legal target exists. The narrow targeting is what keeps the destroy clause honest: it only answers its own creature type, so the effect swings between a clean removal upgrade and a liability you have to pay your way out of depending on what is on the table. Flanking on top makes the 2/2 awkward to block profitably in the era's ground stalls, but the body was never the point. The card is a snapshot of mid-90s design reaching for tension through optional costs and narrow targeting before either idea had a settled vocabulary, when "pay or else" effects were still being discovered rather than templated.