Order of the Stars

Pure protection at the cheapest possible price, with the body shaved down to nothing to pay for it. The trade is unusually honest: a 0/1 with Defender is a wall and only a wall, so the entire return on the white mana is the chosen-color protection it carries onto the battlefield. That makes it a configurable answer rather than a creature, a one-drop you point at whatever color is grinding you down. Against an aggressive red board it shrugs off burn and chump-blocks indefinitely; name black and it can't be hit by targeted removal and never dies to combat damage from a same-color attacker. The cost of that flexibility is that the color locks in on entry, so the wall answers the matchup in front of you rather than the spell on the stack. And it answers a narrow slice even then: protection lives entirely on the battlefield, so it does nothing for the creature spell itself (a counter still stops it from ever arriving), and because it prevents targeting rather than reshaping the rules, it offers no cover against effects that target the player, like edicts. What it does, it does cheaply and permanently. Defender keeps the rate fair by guaranteeing it never becomes a threat, only a fixture, which is why the protection can be this open-ended for this little: a wall built before the problem arrives, committed in advance rather than held in reserve.