Remedy

The two-mana entry in white's old prevention suite, and the one whose only real selling point is the divide-as-you-choose clause. Damage prevention was a whole subgenre in the early sets: Healing Salve gave you three points for one mana, the various Circles of Protection turned off colors entirely, and a long tail of instants parceled out a fixed pool against whatever was incoming. What separates this from a straight life-gain effect is the targeting flexibility: five points spread across any number of recipients, which means it can split a combat step (saving two blockers at once) or soak a Fireball aimed at your face while still leaving headroom for a creature on the same turn. The design problem prevention shields always faced is that they answer damage and nothing else; a prevention instant does nothing against a counterspell, a sacrifice effect, or a creature that simply outsizes the shield, and it carries the dead-card risk that any reactive answer carries when the threat never materializes. That fragility is why this style of card largely fell out of the file as removal and burn diversified past pure damage. It survives now as a record of an era when "prevent the next N damage" was treated as a real strategic axis rather than a footnote.