Patrol Hound

Discarding a card to win a single point of combat priority is a losing trade in isolation: you spend a whole card to make a 2/2 hit first once. The design only makes sense if the discard is something you wanted to do anyway. Built for a graveyard-fueled shell where every card pitched to the bin powers threshold and flashback, the activation flips from cost to upside: you fill the yard regardless, and the dog stops opposing two-drops cold while doing it. The first strike is repeatable each turn for as many cards as you can spare, so a body that reads as ordinary becomes a defensive anchor that wins early combats and never has to die trading. That is the whole hinge of the card: the same line of text is a tax in one deck and a free ability in another, and the only thing separating the two is whether the deck treats its hand as fuel or as resources to protect. Where discard is a payoff rather than a sacrifice, the cost is already priced into the gameplan, and the first strike becomes incidental value on top of a discard you would have made regardless.