Thunder Spirit

A study in what the keyword stack costs when you shrink the body. The double-white in the casting cost is the discipline that pays for flying and first strike together: it locks the card into white-heavy shells at a time when Legends was actively luring players toward greedier multicolor decks. First strike is the keyword doing the real work here, and it reads almost entirely on the small frame. A 2/2 flier that hits first beats any other 2-toughness flier in the air outright, dealing its damage before theirs ever lands, and it can block a larger ground attacker, deal first, and walk away clean against anything its two damage kills. The ceiling is exactly where the two power sets it: it cannot kill a 3-toughness creature, so it stalls bigger bodies rather than trading into them, and against fliers it tops out at clearing the small stuff. That is the deliberate tradeoff against the larger white evasive finishers of the era, which buy their size and resilience with a heavier cost and a different combat role. The combination of flying and first strike on a cheap white body has since become a standard template for the color, but this was an early printing that helped establish the rate. The Elemental type line is an artifact of the Grand Creature Type Update; on printing it was a Spirit, with the Elemental tag added decades later as the tribe became a mechanical identity rather than a flavor descriptor.