Circle of Despair

A damage-prevention engine priced as a sacrifice outlet, which is a strange and revealing way to build a defensive card. The conversion is total: a creature you already control becomes a single prevention shield, aimed at a source of your choice. That source-selection clause is the design's real lever, and it is deliberately not a targeting effect. Choosing a source rather than targeting one means hexproof, shroud, and protection on the attacker do not matter; you name the thing about to deal damage and blank its next instance entirely. Prevention here is all-or-nothing for that instance: name a 5/5 and the full five is gone, name a Fireball and all of it is gone. Because it is an activated ability, the shield can be set up at instant speed in response to whatever is about to deal the damage. The repeatability is the tradeoff that justifies the rate: no cap on activations beyond your supply of creatures and a mana each time, so a board you would otherwise lose gets metered out into a sequence of one-shot blanks across a turn. It reads like a Mirage-era attempt to give the white-black control deck a recursive answer to burn and combat in one permanent, leaning on black's willingness to spend bodies and white's tradition of preventing damage. The friction is in hand: every use costs a creature and a mana, so it rewards a deck already manufacturing fodder rather than one clinging to its last threat. Prevention reframed as attrition.