Phyrexian Crusader
Two protections stacked on an infect body is not redundancy: it is a deliberate combination that locks out the two colors most likely to break up an aggressive plan. Red holds the cheapest, most flexible burn; white holds the cheapest exile and unconditional kill. Protection from both means the standard "point removal answers the clock" relationship simply does not apply, and the poison rolls in regardless of how many removal spells the opponent draws. First strike does its own defensive work in combat: against blockers outside those colors it trades up by dealing its poison before the blocker connects. As a 2/2, it places two poison counters per swing, so five clean connections finish a player off, but that math arrives faster than it looks when the usual interaction is dead in the opponent's hand and a single Infect anthem effect cuts the count in half. The body is small and the protections are narrow enough that blue, green, and black answer it cleanly, which is the cost paid for being nearly unkillable against the two colors it does cover. That is the design tension worth naming: an infect creature is only as good as its ability to keep connecting, and this one buys that consistency by being a hard read against exactly the removal suites built to stop fast clocks.



