Prismatic Boon

A scaling protection effect that sounds like a niche combat trick until you notice the seam it sits on: this is mass protection priced as an instant, with X buying breadth across multiple bodies rather than depth on one. Protection from a chosen color is among the most lopsided effects in the game's toolbox, doing four jobs at once (it prevents damage, blocks enchanting and equipping, stops blocking, and shuts off targeting), so paying to spread that across a board of attackers covers a lot of ground in a single cast. It is a single-color answer, though: you name one color, and everything off that axis still gets through, which holds the effect short of a blanket fog. It is a scalpel against a mono-colored opponent, not protection from the whole table. The instant-speed window is where the design earns its keep, but only against the things protection actually touches. Point it at a targeted removal spell aimed at your board, or fire it mid-combat to make X creatures unblockable and unburnable by the named color, and they slide out from under it. What it cannot do is dodge a sweeper that destroys, exiles, or bounces, since those effects neither target nor deal damage; protection has never answered "destroy all creatures." It rewards reading what the opponent has committed to, since you choose the color after seeing the threat, and it reads today as a generous version of an effect later printings deliberately narrowed.