Lazotep Plating

A protection spell that leaves a body behind. Blue's answer to targeted removal and the edict has usually been pure counterplay: a bounce, a redirect, a flat "no." This bundles the defensive half with a proactive one, so the mana you spend saving your board also grows a threat. Amass Zombies 1 means the card is never dead even when your opponent has no target for it: you still put a counter on an Army you control, or spin up a fresh 0/0 Zombie Army token to hold it. That matters because the classic failure of a held-up protection spell is the whiff, the card you cradle all game and eventually discard as a blank. This one has a floor. The hexproof reaches wide, covering you and every permanent you control, which makes it a shield against targeted interaction in general rather than a single-creature bodyguard like Vines of Vastwood or a pump-and-protect trick like Blossoming Defense. Crucially, granting the player hexproof also blanks the traditional targeted edict, the "target player sacrifices a creature" that most blue tricks let through: the spell fizzles for want of a legal target. The gap worth naming is the untargeted sweep, a wrath or a mass-sacrifice effect that never points at anything and so passes clean. Within that lane the design is quietly greedy in a way blue instants rarely are: it protects, it develops, and every use after the first stacks another counter on a growing Army, turning a reactive slot into a slow clock.