Alms

Damage prevention, metered out one point at a time and billed in a currency you would rather not spend. The front is a single white mana; everything after that is where the cost lives. Each shield runs a mana plus the top card of your graveyard, exiled for good, which means stopping a Grizzly Bears swing takes two activations and two cards fed into exile. Anything that wants those cards back (the period's recursion effects, later threshold and flashback payoffs) is drawing from the same well the prevention engine drains. That is the balancing mechanism: granular point-by-point prevention would be oppressive at no cost, so the card prices each blocked point in a resource most decks treat as an asset. What you get plays less like a removal answer and more like an attrition valve, the kind of permanent that grinds out a single combat across many activations rather than turning a game. It comes from a white that chased inevitability over efficiency, the lineage of fog effects and lifegain walls, written before the design language shifted toward answering damage by removing its source rather than counting the points down by hand.