Gods Willing

For one white mana, this buys two things that rarely arrive together: a combat trick that wins fights without changing a single number, and an answer to targeted removal that resolves the threat rather than racing it. Protection from the color of your choice is the broadest defensive shrug in white's toolkit, and at instant speed it folds removal spells, blocks, and Auras into a single response. The reactive use is the cleanest part of the design: you hold it until a kill spell is already on the stack, then name that spell's color as this resolves, and the creature stops being a legal target before the spell ever connects. No guessing, no reading the table; the stack hands you the color for free. What raises the card above its predecessors is that it almost never feels wasted. A bare one-mana protection spell can whiff entirely when the opponent has nothing to kill and nothing to block, leaving you holding a dead card. Here, so long as you control a creature to point it at, you can fire it off for the scry 1 alone and still smooth your next draw, so the floor never bottoms out at zero. You play it for the protection: the broadest, cheapest insurance white sells against removal and a winning block both. The scry is the rider that means the spell is doing something even on the turns the protection has nothing to protect against.