Revered Elder

Pay one mana, stop one point of damage to this body, and keep doing it as long as your lands hold out: a 1/2 that, in a vacuum, shrugs off small attackers and a single point of burn. The defect is the arithmetic. One mana buys exactly one point of prevention, so propping up a one-power blocker drains an entire turn's worth of resources, and an attacker only has to commit enough power that you run out of mana before you run out of points. That ratio taxes the defender far harder than the aggressor while contributing nothing to the board's offense, which is why pay-per-point prevention on a stick has all but disappeared from later design. It belongs to a late-1990s instinct for small, mana-gated, fiddly effects, the same impulse that filtered defense through a meter rather than the clean one-shot prevention white settled on once efficiency became the priority. As a record of how the color's defensive toolkit was tuned before that shift, it instructs more than it plays.