Teferi's Honor Guard

A flanking creature that can opt out of combat math entirely is a strange little design experiment. Flanking on offense punishes ground blockers without the keyword, the standard reward for the mechanic that defined the Visions era's white and red Knights. The phasing ability is the twist: paying double blue to push the body out of existence until your next untap step turns the Honor Guard into something other than a beater. While phased out it dodges sorcery-speed sweepers, sidesteps targeted removal, and preserves whatever Aura or counter you have invested in it (phasing, unlike exile-and-return effects, keeps everything attached and intact). The catch is the timing. The creature only returns immediately before your untap step, and it phases back in exactly as it left, so a permanent phased out tapped comes back tapped. Phase it out on your own turn and you have spent the protection plus a full turn of board presence to get it back. The blue activation cost also pins this to two-color or splash builds, an early gesture at the kind of color-bleeding utility creature later sets would make routine. It reads as a curiosity, and it largely is: phasing was a polarizing mechanic Wizards retired from regular sets for years, and welding it to a modest Knight body produced a card more interesting as a record of what flanking and phasing were trying to be than as a card anyone reached for.