Tajic, Legion's Edge

Boros has always struggled to be more than the sum of aggression and combat tricks, and the way this Tajic resolves that tension is by writing the format's removal math into the team's defense. The noncombat damage prevention is narrowly built: it shields every other creature you control, but never the legend himself, which keeps a Boros board intact through the symmetrical sweepers (the Pyroclasms, the Anger of the Gods effects) that punish go-wide red-white starts. That clause turns a deck that historically folded to a single board wipe into one that walks through the small ones, which is the structural problem the guild had never solved cheaply. Mentor does the offensive half of the job, growing the curve forward each combat so the counters land on the creatures still in play rather than the ones about to die. The first-strike pump is the close: a repeatable way to win a combat math the prevention clause has already tilted, since your blockers and attackers survive the burn that would otherwise trade them down. Read together, the abilities point in one direction (commit the board, attack, and let the small removal bounce off), and the body is built to lead that charge rather than hang back, which is why the prevention pointedly excludes itself.