Lance

First strike, grafted onto a creature for a single white and nothing else. The design is pure rate-without-restriction: no power boost, no toughness padding, no conditional trigger, just the keyword. That austerity is also why the card aged the way it did. Auras as a category carry an unforgiving cost (the two-for-one when the creature dies), and a pump Aura that does not pump has to clear a high bar to justify the card disadvantage. Subsequent designs added riders: equipment versions made the first strike portable, instant-speed combat tricks gave the same swing without the permanent commitment, and pump Auras started bundling stat boosts and protection to earn their slot. What this card preserves is the cleanest possible statement of the design idea (first strike as a single-mana enchantment effect), the bare proof-of-concept that later white aggressive toolkits were built on top of. The flavor angle is the chivalric one: a knight's lance as the literal grant of the keyword, an early example of Magic using equipment-as-flavor to teach a mechanic. The card itself has stayed in its original orbit, but the idea it isolated reappears in every cheap first-strike enabler white has printed since.