Youthful Knight

A textbook expression of what first strike was worth on a small body in white's early years. The pitch is purely arithmetic: a 2/1 that strikes first trades up against most two-drops, killing a 2/2 before it can swing back and surviving the exchange, while anything it cannot outright kill still has to respect that it lands the first blow. The single point of toughness is the deliberate brake on that rate: it dies to any incidental ping, any one-damage sweeper, any blocker that pairs first strike with its own. That fragility is precisely why the card never escaped vanilla-plus filler duty; first strike on offense is excellent right up until something points one point of damage at it. As a Knight, it sat at the front of white's keyword-soldier tradition long before that creature type carried any tribal weight, and the design has been reprinted and reskinned many times over: the simplest possible answer to "what does a cheap white aggressive creature with combat upside look like," repeated because the template works and demands nothing clever from the player holding it.