Marauding Knight

Hate cards usually punish a strategy by being inert against everyone else; this one punishes white by feeding on it. The base body is filler against a deck without Plains, but every Plains an opponent controls makes it bigger, so against a mono-white opponent it scales into a genuine threat while it sits across the table shrugging off their targeted removal. Protection from white is the load-bearing half: it cannot be blocked profitably by white creatures, cannot be targeted by white burn or pacification effects, and ignores white-based combat damage entirely. That combination means the card is not merely large against white, it is nearly untouchable by it, which is exactly the matchup where its power most balloons. The trade-off is the obvious one: against any deck not playing Plains, you have spent four mana on a two-power body whose protection clause may never come up. This is sideboard-grade design pushed onto the main face of a card, the sort of color-hosing that early-era enemy-color themes leaned into hard, where a card is built to be lopsided rather than universally useful. The counting clause keys off Plains specifically rather than white permanents, so a white deck splashing off nonbasics starves it; the punishment lands hardest on the decks most committed to the color it hates.