Vodalian Knights

Two coupled restrictions pull against each other and define the whole design: the creature can only attack a player who controls an Island, and it sacrifices itself the moment you control none yourself. The first clause hostages its offense to the table around it; the second turns your own manabase into a survival condition, so a Strip Mine or Wasteland aimed at the right land doesn't merely slow you down, it kills the creature outright. That fragility is the price for a body genuinely overstatted for its era: a 2/2 first striker that can buy evasion at instant speed for one blue mana. The activated flying ability is the part that has aged best, since paying repeatedly turns a ground blocker into a recurring aerial threat without committing mana when it isn't needed. This was Fallen Empires expressing factional flavor through hard mechanical conditions rather than through stats alone, an approach the game largely abandoned because the downside reads as punishment for facing the wrong opponent rather than a meaningful choice. The result is conditional aggression whose offense depends entirely on what lands sit across the table, the sort of design that didn't survive into later sets.