Ghosts of the Innocent

The damage halving works in both directions, which is the whole catch. The static effect cuts incoming damage to half, rounded down, so any source dealing a single point now connects for nothing: one halved and rounded down is zero. A two-power attacker still gets through for one, but pingers, one-toughness swarms, and incremental burn collapse to nothing entirely. That makes this a near-total shield against the smallest threats and a hard tax on everything bigger. But it does not discriminate by controller, so your own burn, your own attackers, and your own removal get halved too. This is a defensive wall masquerading as a beater, a 4/5 body whose real text is a global damage cut that punishes aggressive strategies far more than patient ones. The rounding-down clause is doing the quiet, ruthless work: it is the difference between an effect that merely slows a fast game and one that switches off whole damage-based plans at the low end. The cost is the obvious balancing pressure (seven mana lands the turn before most decks would have closed), but the symmetry is the deeper one. Effects that warp combat math without owner-restriction tend to favor whoever was already winning the long game, and this is squarely that kind of design: a fortress for the grinder, an anchor for anyone trying to race. It sits in a lineage of damage-prevention statics that ask you to win without landing the last points in one swing.