Tsabo Tavoc

Built to hunt one specific kind of creature, and almost nothing else. Protection from legendary creatures was a near-unheard-of qualifier when this Phyrexian general arrived, and it stacks with a tap ability that destroys a legend outright and forbids regeneration. The two halves point in the same direction: this is an assassin for the legendary slot, a body that cannot be blocked by your opponent's named threats while it methodically dismantles them. The cost of that focus is right there in the toughness. A 7/4 with first strike swings hard and dies to nearly everything that is not a legendary creature, so the protection clause that makes it dominant in a mirror of marquee threats does nothing against the rank-and-file that fills most boards. As a piece of design it belongs to a specific Invasion-era impulse: a multicolor block whose theme was the collision of named characters, where a card whose entire purpose was murdering other legends had a context to matter. Outside that frame the protection reads as flavor more than function, and the destroy ability becomes an expensive, color-intensive removal engine that still has to survive a turn to fire. Tsabo Tavoc is what happens when a removal spell is welded to a creature and aimed at one target type: lethal against its intended prey, oddly fragile against everything that is not.