Midnight Duelist

Hate-bear design in its most literal form: a creature whose entire reason for existing is to be a thorn in one tribe's side. Protection from Vampires is about as narrow as a keyword gets, the kind of pointed answer that only prints when a set has a clearly defined tribal antagonist to aim it at. The clause is precise about what it actually buys, though, and the precision is easy to overstate: against Vampires it cannot be blocked by their creatures, cannot be targeted by their abilities or any Vampire-typed spell, and prevents combat damage from their attackers. What it does not do is dodge ordinary removal cast by a Vampire deck, because Doom Blade and the like are not Vampire sources. The protection turns the corner on creature combat and tribal targeting, not on the broader removal suite. The body is incidental to all of this; the 1/2 is there because the keyword has to live on something, and the stat line is deliberately forgettable. Single-tribe protection creatures like this one live or die by the matchup: a blank against most of the world and a wall against exactly one slice of it. That swing is the whole proposition. The card is answer-tech that assumes its antagonist will show up, and it has nothing to say when that antagonist stays home.