Sacred Boon

A damage prevention spell that pays you back for the prevention, which is a genuinely odd shape for a fog-style effect. Most combat tricks that protect a creature do so by inflating its toughness up front; this one inverts the order, absorbing up to three damage now and converting whatever it actually stopped into permanent +0/+1 counters once the turn winds down. The design discipline lives in that "for each 1 damage prevented" clause: the upside scales with the threat, so a creature swung into by a small attacker yields little, while one that eats a real beating walks away durably larger. The card rewards stepping into damage rather than dodging it, a trick whose value is highest precisely when the prevented damage would have mattered most. The delayed timing on the counters is the quiet catch: the toughness boost lands after combat resolves, not during it, so it never saves the creature from a second blocker on the same turn the way a flat +0/+3 would. You are paying for prevention now and growth later, two effects on slightly different clocks. It is a representative artifact of mid-90s white design, when prevention was a load-bearing pillar of the color and Wizards was still experimenting with turning the act of soaking damage into something with a lasting payoff.