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Moxonomy

Heal

InstantWhite mana

The smallest prevention shield in the game stapled to a delayed cantrip, and a window into how Wizards costed card draw in the mid-90s. One white mana stops a lone point of incoming damage and replaces the spell, but the replacement is throttled: you do not draw on resolution, you draw at the next upkeep. That delay is the design tax that keeps the card from being a free filter; you spend the mana and the prevention now and collect the card on someone else's clock, which means the prevention has to justify the slot on its own, and almost never does. The shield is so marginal that the cantrip is really the whole pitch, and even that pitch arrives a turn behind. What the card documents is an era when stapling "draw a card" to a spell was considered dangerous enough to shrink the spell and slow the draw down around it, before Wizards settled on the modern convention of drawing immediately when the cantrip resolves. Read against later one-mana white instants, the throttle sits in plain view: the floor of the prevention was set this low precisely because the card advantage was the half that worried the designers.

Heal (5ed)
5ED · #32common
Pricing
Normal: $0.16
Foil:
Oracle Text

Rules text

Prevent the next 1 damage that would be dealt to any target this turn. Draw a card at the beginning of the next turn's upkeep.
Legalities

Format Status

Standard
N/A
Pioneer
N/A
Modern
N/A
Legacy
Legal
Vintage
Legal
Commander
Legal
Pauper
Legal
Brawl
N/A
Historic
N/A
Alchemy
N/A
Timeless
N/A
Standard Brawl
N/A
More formats
Old School
N/A
Premodern
Legal
PreDH
Legal
Pauper Commander
Legal
Oathbreaker
Legal
Gladiator
N/A
Penny Dreadful
N/A
Duel Commander
Legal
Future Standard
N/A
COMPETITIVEBRAWL
N/A
TLR
Legal
Printings elsewhere

Other printings

2 sets
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