Pestilent Kathari

The clearest argument this card makes is a color-pie one: it sits in black, but its sharpening ability is paid for in red. That cross-color activation marks it as an artifact of multicolor block design, where individual cards were built to reward players who could already produce a second color rather than splash purely for it. The body itself is the deathtouch flier's standard package, a 1/1 evasive blocker that trades up with anything it touches in the air or on the ground. What red adds is the resolution of deathtouch's one structural weakness: a 1/1 that swings into a larger creature still destroys it but dies alongside it, since combat damage is simultaneous. First strike rewrites that combat math, letting the bird land its lethal point of damage first and walk away. Pairing deathtouch with first strike is a small, durable design trick (any first-striking deathtoucher becomes a creature that kills nearly anything it fights and survives), and stapling the two together across a color boundary is the wrinkle here. The cost is the friction: you need red mana available at the moment combat resolves, and without it the card reverts to a fragile evasive deathtouch flier. It is a deliberately conditional creature, built for a deck already standing in two colors and willing to hold up the mana to make a 1/1 punch above its size in a fight it should lose.