Tundra Wolves

White's earliest experiment with first strike at one mana, and a useful artifact for understanding how cautiously the color pie was drawn in the game's first years. The card reads as unremarkable now because the rate has been comprehensively eclipsed: Mother of Runes, Soltari Monk, Soltari Priest, and eventually Student of Warfare all gave white a more capable one-drop with abilities beyond a bare stat line (protection, evasion, a level-up curve). Tundra Wolves got the keyword and nothing else, and that nakedness is the design point. First strike on a 1/1 is a defensive combat-math tool, not a clock: it cleanly kills any attacking X/1 before that creature can deal damage back, and against anything bigger it is purely a deterrent rather than a trade. A 2/2 that runs in takes a point in the first strike step and survives to return lethal in the normal step, so the Wolf does not punish larger bodies; it only wins exchanges with one-toughness creatures. The card was priced for an era when a plain unkeyworded 1/1 for was the going baseline (Savannah Lions was the aggressive outlier at 2/1), and bolting a keyword onto that body without a stat bump counted as a genuine upgrade. The Wolf type is a quiet curiosity: white wolves are rare in the game's creature-type history, and the choice predates the tribal conventions that would later sort wolves toward green and red. A snapshot of what a keyword was worth before the curve got pushed.