Repentant Blacksmith

Protection from red, stapled to a 1/2 body for two mana, is the purest expression of a hoser: a card that exists not to be good on average but to be unbeatable in a specific matchup. The design predates the color pie's modern discipline, when Wizards still printed answers as creatures rather than as sideboard cards, and when "protection from" was treated as a complete solution rather than a carefully metered keyword. The Blacksmith blanks Lightning Bolt, walks past Mons's Goblin Raiders, ignores Shivan Dragon's combat damage, and cannot be targeted by any red removal of its era. Against a deck without red, it is a Grizzly Bears that has lost a point of power; against a mono-red deck, it is a wall the opponent simply cannot interact with through normal means. That binary outcome is the design idea, and it is also why the archetype faded: modern sideboarding assumes you bring in answers tuned to the matchup, not creatures that happen to be answers, and protection has since been rationed out at higher rates or attached to bodies that do more than stand in the way. The Blacksmith belongs to the era when the sideboard lived in the maindeck, and the only question a hoser had to answer was whether the hosed color was across the table.