Deep Wood

Compare it to Fog, the one-mana green standard, and the gap is entirely about choice: Fog is a free-floating combat trick castable whenever you like, which is what lets experienced players bluff with it, hold it, and bait an alpha strike before firing. This version hardcodes the timing into the rules text. There is exactly one legal moment to cast it (after a swing has been declared against you), and that single window strips out the whole bluffing layer and the question of when to commit. The card was engineered against misplay: the only time it can be cast is the moment of obvious danger, and the two-mana cost rather than one is the tax for that clarity, a deliberate downgrade so the teaching version would never read as a strict upgrade over the real article. Worth noting it protects nothing but your own life total; it caps damage to you, not to your other permanents, so a creature you control still trades and dies normally. That narrowing is the whole tell of Portal's mandate, a set built to teach turn structure by forcing cards to announce their own correct timing. A historical curiosity now, but a clean specimen of how Wizards once taught timing by removing the very choices that make timing interesting.