Peregrine Griffin

A defensive flyer that wins the fights it picks. The 2/4 body is built to block: four toughness survives most early aggression, and first strike means the 2 power lands before an attacking creature with equal or smaller toughness can swing back, so it trades up against the small-to-midsized fliers that would otherwise outrace a ground-bound defense. That combat math explains why white keeps printing bodies like this in its beginner-facing common slots: toughness and first strike together turn a modest creature into a brick wall, a flyer does not need to hit hard to dominate the air, and the defender often dictates the terms of an aerial stalemate. Five mana for a 2/4 reads slow on rate, and it is, but the point was never tempo. The card anchors a defensive white deck and gives a new player a clean lesson in how first strike rewrites a combat step rather than just stacking extra damage onto it. Outside that teaching role it has little to say, and it has never needed to.