Serra Zealot

Vanilla-plus filler from a set that mostly cared about the broken stuff: the Tolarian Academy engines, the free spells, the Yawgmoth's Will turns. This was the white common that filled out a creature deck's curve and traded up in combat thanks to the first strike, the kind of body the era handed out at the bottom of the rarity sheet while it reserved its design ambition for the cards that warped formats. The math behind it is simple and timeless: a 1/1 with first strike kills anything it blocks with one toughness before it takes a swing back, and it survives the same exchange on offense against a 1/1 with no first strike of its own. That makes it a tempo piece against ground stalls of small creatures, though the ceiling is low; one extra point of toughness on the other side and the first strike does nothing. There is no synergy hook, no tribal payoff, no activated ability to build around. It is exactly what it says it is, designed to give white weenie decks of its day a cheap aggressive drop that punched slightly above its size in the early combat steps before bigger threats came online.