Baffling Defenses

Traditional white creature-neutering wants a slot on the battlefield: Pacifism, Faith's Fetters, and Darksteel Mutation all sit as permanents you control, which means they can be Disenchanted, bounced, or blinked away with the creature stapled back to full strength. This does the same job without the attachment. Because perpetual bakes the change into the digital object rather than a permanent, there is nothing to remove: no enchantment to destroy, no equip to unattach, and a bounce spell that would ordinarily reset an Aura instead returns a creature whose base power is still zero, because the effect travels with it. What the perpetual clause buys you is durability against removal, not durability against buffs. Setting base power to 0 works at the layer where base characteristics are set, so anthem effects and +1/+1 counters applied afterward still add on top: a lord or a single counter turns your zeroed creature back into a threat, and here minus-counters would actually have held up better against those additions. The design is honest in the other direction, too, leaving toughness and abilities untouched, so anything that fights, taps for value, or wins without attacking shrugs it off entirely. It is a clean demonstration of what perpetual was built for in the client-only space: rewrite the object itself so white's usual soft-removal answers do not apply, while accepting that a permanent debuff living on the card is not the same as a debuff that can outrun a pump.