Benalish Missionary

Tap it, pay two more mana, and a blocked attacker's swing fizzles for the turn: a defensive fog stapled to a body, with the freight charged on the activation rather than the cast. The gap between the single white deployment cost and the steep tax to actually use it is the whole story. The catch lives in the targeting. The creature has to already be blocked, which makes this a combat-step instrument rather than a removal spell; you commit a blocker first, then spend the activation to undo the damage you would have taken or to neuter an attacker your own blocker cannot kill outright. That sequencing demand kept it honest in an era when white was still calibrating how much damage prevention it could hand a one-toughness body. The chump never has to die, and the prevention floats free of color or creature type, so it answers a 6/6 as readily as a 2/2. What it cannot do is reach across the table on its own terms: no block, no target, no value. The result is slow, attrition-minded prevention from a period when Wizards built effects around the combat phase rather than around the stack, and the activation is the price of giving a repeatable fog a creature to live on.