Druid's Deliverance
The Fog with a payoff. Damage prevention has always been a frustrating thing to spend a card on: you stop a hit, the board state is unchanged, and you have traded a card to buy a single turn of survival. This one tries to dignify the trade by stapling Populate to the back end, so the same instant that turns aside an alpha strike also duplicates whatever creature token you have lying around. The math depends entirely on what populate finds: copy a 1/1 Saproling and you have padded a Fog with a chump blocker, but copy a sizable token and you have swung the board you were just defending. That conditionality is the whole bargain, since the prevention half always works and the populate half does nothing in a deck running no creature tokens. It rewards the kind of go-wide token build that wants a defensive trick anyway, where every cast both stalls the race and adds to the army that wins it. As a piece of populate-era design, it is the gentlest application of the keyword: no enters-the-battlefield value, no engine, just a body grafted onto a defensive spell to keep it from being a pure tempo loss.


