Benevolent Bodyguard

A chump blocker stops one attacker's damage and dies a body; this one spends the same death on something far more flexible. Sacrifice it in response to a removal spell and the targeted creature gains protection from that spell's color, walking past a Lightning Bolt or a Doom Blade; sacrifice it during combat and a key blocker shrugs off an entire color's worth of attackers until end of turn. The color is chosen on resolution rather than fixed, so the same 1/1 answers burn, black point-removal, or white exile depending on what the opponent commits: you pay the cost first and pick the color once you know the threat. That late choice is the whole point, not the body, which was always going to be spent. The Cleric is a one-mana down payment on a one-shot protection effect, the kind of trick that normally lives in hand. Committing it to the battlefield early trades concealment for tempo: yes, it sits in a public zone where an opponent can see the answer is available and play around it, but the activation costs no mana when the moment comes, so a tapped-out turn still has its defensive line ready. It rewards builds organized around a single must-protect creature: an equipped beater, a voltron general, a combo piece that needs to survive one rotation. The design problem it resolves is paying for protection in advance while deferring the only decision that matters until the information arrives.