Teroh's Vanguard

The threshold gate is the whole design conceit: the protection shield does nothing while your graveyard is thin and the early game still rewards clean two-for-ones, then switches on exactly when your own graveyard has crossed seven cards, the same point at which a grindy black metagame has typically run long enough to be dangerous. Flash is what turns a modest 2/3 into a combat and removal trick. An opponent commits creatures to a profitable attack or points a black removal spell at your board, you drop this at instant speed, and protection from black lands on every creature you control, stranding the commitment. The effect is deliberately single-shot, riding the enter trigger and lapsing at end of turn, so it answers one decisive moment rather than locking a black deck out of the game. That restraint is the point: it is a conditional counterpunch, gated to be a reactive hedge against an archetype rather than a freestanding threat. Tying the defensive payoff to the same seven-card graveyard condition that black decks of the era were being rewarded for filling is a tidy bit of symmetry, an example of an early-era design philosophy that handed white narrow, reactive tools to survive the colors built to grind it down.