Silver Knight
Two white mana for a 2/2 first striker is a fair body; the protection from red is what turns it into a hate card. Protection does its work before a spell is ever cast: a red burn spell cannot legally target Silver Knight, so the Lightning Bolt or Incinerate sitting in the opponent's hand is dead text, not a fizzled effort. The same clause settles combat without help from anything else: protection prevents all damage from red sources, so a red attacker bounces off this 2/2 without scratching it, and a red blocker deals nothing back while Silver Knight strikes first. First strike is the extra teeth against everything that is not red, letting Silver Knight win same-size combats outright. The design is a clean color-pie counterpunch, white answering red's two main avenues (cheap removal and aggressive creatures) in a single card. The cost of that specialization is its narrowness: against any other color this is a plain 2/2 with first strike, a body that asks the deckbuilder to know what it is fighting. That makes it less a default inclusion than a precision tool, reached for when the room is full of Mountains. It sits in the long line of white knights built to make a specific matchup nearly unwinnable for the opponent, trading flexibility for a wall the enemy color simply cannot climb.




