War Machine, James Rhodes
The tap trigger fires on attack declaration, which is the whole reason it plays as tempo rather than a mana-open activation you have to protect. Because it resolves before blockers, the tap is either the one flier you want off the block or the untapped blocker your opponent was holding back to trade: board control folded into the same action that pressures life totals, no separate ability to hold up. A 3/2 flier does the work from the air, so it dodges the ground-based retaliation a grounded pinger invites while still chipping in. The tap, not a freeze, is what keeps this honest: the creature untaps on its controller's turn, so the reward accrues by stacking single-turn tempo hits swing after swing rather than any one of them shutting a door. The hybrid pip does the quiet structural work: it lets a mono-white or mono-blue shell run this without a fixer's tax, not just the Azorius deck it obviously belongs in. What you get is a low-friction, repeatable disruption engine that never quite locks anyone out, only holds the game ajar one turn at a time.
