Windreaper Falcon

Protection from blue stapled to a Red-Green flyer is a deliberate color-pie statement: the two colors least equipped to grind out blue's tempo game get a single body that, once it resolves and sticks, blue simply cannot lay a hand on. The keyword does real work on the battlefield, blanking blue blockers, dodging blue removal and tap-and-bounce effects aimed at it, and refusing blue enchantments and Auras. Note the boundary, though: protection only matters while the creature is in play. It does nothing to keep the spell off the stack, and a blue counterspell answers Windreaper Falcon as cleanly as it answers anything else. That the body is only a 1/1 is the point. This was never a beater but a hatebear in disguise, a flyer whose entire value proposition is being untargetable by exactly one opponent once it has landed. Built during the period when protection was Magic's primary lever for encoding color rivalries directly onto creatures, the design works as a thesis more than a threat: Gruul does not out-think blue, it resolves a creature blue cannot easily interact with and lets the clock do the rest. The narrowness is the honesty of the design. Against any deck without blue cards, it is a French vanilla 1/1 flyer; against the right opponent, most of the targeted removal and bounce in their deck reads as a blank.