Narwhal

The product of a design philosophy that defined Homelands: hyper-specific creatures tuned to beat one color and nothing else. Four mana toward a 2/2 buys you first strike and protection from red, which reads like a calculated answer to the era's aggressive red decks packing burn and small fast bodies. Protection from red does most of the heavy lifting against that plan: red burn cannot legally target this creature at all, red creatures cannot block it and any combat damage from red attackers is prevented, and a red source can do nothing to it through targeting. Size and combat tricks on the red side are irrelevant; the protection clause voids the math before it starts, so first strike does no extra work in those matchups. Where first strike earns its keep is everywhere else: against blue, black, green, or white, it lets this 2/2 win combat against anything with two or less toughness without taking damage back, and survive trades it would otherwise lose. The protection, by contrast, goes dead the instant the opponent is not red. That is the tension the card was built around: a hatebear before the term existed, with sideboard logic baked into a maindeck slot, sized and worded for a metagame slice rather than a board state. The flavor of a whale immune to fire is the kind of literal-minded color-pie joke the set traded in, and the card has aged into a reference point for how narrowly Wizards once let a creature's relevance be gated to a single opposing color.