Serra Inquisitors
A pure artifact of its set's worldbuilding, where mechanics were bent to fit the lore of a conflict between factions. The combat bonus only switches on against black creatures, and only in combat: this encodes the narrative of holy clerics warring against the powers of darkness directly into rules text, with no thought given to whether the trigger would matter at a table. As a designed object it represents an early, awkward stab at color-hatred-as-mechanic, the idea that a card should be sized not by raw stats but by what it punishes. The execution is the problem the school never solved. The body's only edge is contingent on the opponent fielding the exact color it hates, in the exact zone (combat) where that color has to commit, which makes the rate dependent on choices the card cannot force. Compare the cleaner protection-from-black templating that did the same thematic job without the conditional combat dance, and the design reads as a flavor decision first and a playable card a distant second. What it preserves is a snapshot of a moment when Magic's designers were still working out how to translate a story's good-versus-evil axis into the color pie, before the lesson that a hoser only earns its slot when the bonus is unconditional enough to matter the turn you draw it.
