Rally

Combat tricks almost always belong to the aggressor: you pay mana to push a single attacker past its blocker or win a damage race. This one inverts the entire transaction. The two white mana buy a board-wide +1/+1, but only for blocking creatures, which means the card cannot push damage, cannot save an alpha strike, and does nothing if you have no creatures back. It functions strictly from behind, rewarding the player who already committed to blocks by quietly resizing a multi-blocker stand into a wall of larger bodies and souring trades the attacker read as even. That reactive-only window is a steep ask for an effect this color-intensive, and it reflects an early design era that priced defensive symmetry-breakers generously, working from the assumption that "defensive" meant "harmless" before the game internalized that the initiative usually rides with whoever swings. The instant speed is where the card earns its keep: held up, it lets a defender declare blocks, watch the attacker do the math, and then rewrite that math during the same Declare Blockers step, before combat damage is assigned. A defender ambushing the trade after blocks are locked is the only context in which a blanket pump on blockers actually steals a game, and it is the single sharp edge on a card otherwise built to do the least intuitive thing two white mana can do.