Elvish Scout

A defensive trick disguised as a one-drop creature, and an early experiment in untap-as-combat-tech. The activated ability does two distinct jobs in one click, both confined to the turn you activate it: it pulls a tapped attacker upright so it can be used again, and it wraps that same creature in a fog so it survives the swing it just made. The damage prevention is what justifies the untap. Untapping a fresh attacker into a hostile blocker normally just feeds it to combat math, but here the prevention clause cancels both halves of the exchange, letting the creature attack and then sit back untapped and intact for the rest of your own turn. The constraint is the cost: a green mana plus the Scout's own tap per activation, so it rescues exactly one attacker, and only if you have the mana floating. Note the symmetry buried in the text: it prevents damage dealt by the target as well as to it, so this is a protection valve, not an offensive enabler. You spend it to keep a creature on the board through a bad block on your turn, or simply to leave a beater untapped and available, never to wring extra combat-damage triggers out of an attacker. A humble body attached to a genuinely fiddly piece of rules text, the kind of utility creature that rewards thinking about combat as two separate steps rather than one.