Lull

A Fog with an exit ramp. Green has always carried combat-damage prevention as a one-shot tempo answer, but the unadorned spell has a structural liability: it sits dead the moment the board stops threatening you, and a stranded blank is exactly the kind of card that earns a spot on the bench. Cycling resolves that. This came out of the same era that introduced cycling, and grafting it onto a narrow reactive effect is precisely the job the mechanic was designed for: a card that is sometimes a blowout and sometimes inert converts into a fresh draw for two generic mana whenever the prevention is irrelevant. The floor that gives is why the rate holds up. You stop paying full freight for a contingency, because the contingency replaces itself and smooths your draw instead of clogging it. The prevention is total and untargeted, blanking the whole combat step rather than dealing with a single attacker, so it answers an alpha strike the same way it answers a lone creature. The restraint in the design lives in how modest both modes are: the Fog half buys time without advancing your own clock, and cycling nets you no card advantage, just a different card, so neither line ever snowballs. Insurance that declines to be wasted.