Paladin en-Vec

A clinic in how layered protection sharpens a body that would otherwise be filler. The combination is doubly punishing: protection from black and from red strips the two colors that most rely on direct damage and targeted removal of their tools, so the spells that usually trade up against a three-drop simply cannot touch it. Protection does the heavy lifting in combat too, since black and red creatures cannot block it and their damage is prevented outright. The keywords also do the quiet work that targeted removal does elsewhere: it dodges enchantment-based answers, absorbs none of their burn, and forces the opponent to find an answer in colors they may not be playing. None of this requires activation or upkeep; the card simply walks onto the battlefield as a wall that aggressive red and disruptive black were both built to remove and now cannot. First strike is the body's contribution against everyone else: against white, blue, and green it is still a 2/2 that wins downhill combat against equal-statted attackers and survives trades it would otherwise lose, even if it has no protection insurance against those colors' answers. It is a deliberately asymmetric design: a Knight tuned to a particular metagame slice rather than a universally good creature, valuable in exact proportion to how much black and red sits across the table.