White Shield Crusader

Protection from black is the keyword that defines this Knight, and it lands on exactly the body where it bites hardest. A 2/1 for double-white folds to most removal, but against a black deck leaning on targeted kill spells it becomes a nuisance: those spells cannot legally target it, and black creatures cannot block it or trade with it in combat. The protection has a hole, though, and it is the obvious one: edicts point at the player rather than the creature, so a forced sacrifice catches this Knight like anything else. In the matchups where black wins by aiming spells at threats, it slips the leash; in the matchups where black wins by making you choose what to sacrifice, the keyword does nothing. The two pump abilities exist to convert that immunity into pressure rather than parking it as a wall. White mana buys evasion past a ground stall; double-white buys reach to close, so a flooding white draw turns spare mana into damage instead of dead cards. The cost structure is the honest part of the deal: the protection rides free on the body, but every point of relevance after the first attack is paid in pips, and the mana-hungry pumps compete with everything else a white deck wants to be doing while tapped out. That tension is the classic shape of a color-hosed beater from the era when protection was printed as a deliberate anti-color weapon rather than incidental keyword soup: a sword aimed at one half of the color pie, dull against the other.