Northern Paladin

Color-pie absolutism, printed on a creature: in the earliest era of the game, white's hatred of black was literal enough that Wizards built a body designed to make one enemy color regret showing up. The design is a hoser dressed as a knight: a four-mana attacker whose activated ability can vaporize any black permanent on the table, gated behind a double-white cost and a tap. The structural logic is pure Alpha. Wizards was establishing color identity by handing each color a sanctioned enemy and a card to remove that enemy's permanents on sight, and the Paladin idea staked out that ground for white. The steep WW activation punishes splashing, and the tap requirement means one use per turn cycle, but the ability fires at instant speed, so the Paladin can answer a black threat the moment it resolves or ambush a removal target before it leaves. The "any black permanent" scope is unconditional and the tradeoff is brutal: this card dominates the one matchup it was built for and contributes almost nothing elsewhere. That lopsidedness is what dates it. Modern design has largely retired the pure color-hoser creature in favor of conditional removal that scales with context, but Northern Paladin is the archetype's clean ancestor: a creature built to make one-fifth of the color pie unplayable across the table from it, and nothing more.