Mending Touch

Regeneration as a one-shot instant, stripped to its bare function: one green mana buys a single creature a shield against the next lethal blow, tapping it and removing it from combat in the process. Where green's instant-speed protection usually arrives bundled with a pump (the classic combat trick that wins a fight outright), this does the opposite, declining to change anything about the board except whether your creature lives. That makes it a reactive answer rather than a proactive one, and it pays for its low cost by doing nothing until the threat is already on the stack or the damage is already incoming. The regeneration mechanic itself has drifted out of green's modern toolkit, edged aside by hexproof, indestructible, and clean blink effects that dodge removal rather than recover from it, so a card whose entire text is the word "regenerate" reads now as a fossil of an older design language. Its strict reactivity is the limit: against exile, sacrifice, or minus-X removal it accomplishes nothing, and a creature with no obvious reason to die is a green mana spent for no effect. What it offers in return is the cheapest possible insurance on a key blocker or attacker, the kind of trick that turns a one-for-one trade into a profitable block while keeping the body around for next turn.