Mending Hands

Damage prevention in a single instant, set at four points and pointable anywhere: the face, a blocker, even an opponent's creature you want to keep alive for some reason of your own. This is white prevention at its most generic, the design every more specialized version refines down from. Where Healing Salve handed you a choice between gaining life and preventing damage, this strips the modality away and commits fully to the prevention half, buying a larger number for the narrower function. The trouble is that prevention has always been the weakest form of damage interaction: it does nothing against a board that isn't attacking, nothing against direct loss-of-life effects, nothing the turn after you cast it. A combat trick that only ever subtracts, never adds, asks the caster to read the attack correctly and spend a card to blank part of it, which is a worse deal than blocking with a creature that survives. Its honest home is the most reactive corner of white's toolkit, where the marginal life saved off a burn spell or an alpha strike occasionally matters more than card economy. As a piece of rules architecture it is clean and complete; as a card you actually want, it is a baseline that cheaper, more conditional, or upside-laden prevention effects have spent decades clearing.