Ronin Cliffrider

The attack trigger is the engine, and the way it is timed is what gives the card its shape: when this Samurai swings, it deals 1 damage to each creature the defending player controls, not just to whatever might block it, and that damage fires on the attack declaration, before blockers are ever chosen. A board of one-toughness tokens or mana dorks shrinks the moment the trigger goes on the stack and resolves, so the defender has to choose blockers from whatever survives the ping rather than committing fresh bodies into combat math later. It is a recurring, narrow sweep that scales with width: the more small creatures sitting across the table, the more the swing erases. Bushido 1 fills out the package, giving the 2/2 a fighting chance once combat is joined, but the attack trigger is what gives the card a reason to keep swinging into a clogged board instead of stalling out. The body is the constraint that pays for that engine. Five mana for a 2/2 is a steep tax, and the creature folds to almost any blocker the ping fails to clear, so it wants an opponent who has overextended into a swarm, not one sitting behind a single large blocker that eats the attacker outright. That makes it a grinder against go-wide boards: an early-era attempt at a red creature that erodes a battlefield through repeated combat rather than one burst of burn.