Zhalfirin Crusader

Flanking was the Mirage block's signature combat keyword, the mechanic that made knights and cavalry feel like a class apart in the early Weatherlight era, and this Crusader is one of its more thoughtful expressions. The keyword itself does the obvious work, punishing ground blockers without flanking by shrinking them in the block step, but the second ability is the real design idea: a repeatable redirection of incoming damage onto any target for white mana plus one. That turns a 2/2 body into something with a slow, grinding reach. Pump mana into it across a turn and combat damage, burn, even fight effects can be siphoned off and pointed elsewhere, one point at a time. The granularity is what keeps it from running away: each activation only covers the next single point, so redirecting a real attacker takes mana and patience instead of a one-shot wall of immunity. It is built around the friction of repetition, not the explosiveness of a single trick. Set this against the later white creatures that bundle resilience and inevitability into a single clean line, and the Crusader reads as a rougher draft of that idea: a small body asked to be both wall and weapon, with the seams still showing. Here it sits in its original, slightly fiddly form: a knight that bites blockers, then quietly turns every drop of damage it absorbs into something it can point back at the table.