Serene Sunset
Most fog effects buy you a full turn by zeroing out the whole attacking team for a fixed price. The X here trades that blanket coverage for surgical scaling: you pay per attacker, picking exactly how many threats to defang and leaving the rest free to swing. That inversion matters more than it looks. A traditional Fog is a binary, all-or-nothing wall; this one lets you neutralize the two attackers that would actually kill you while letting a chump-blockable third connect for nothing important, or spend big against a wide board when the math demands it. The flexibility cuts both ways, and that is the honest balancing tension: against a single huge threat you are paying full freight to stop one creature, where a flat-rate fog would have done the same job cheaper and walled the rest besides. It rewards reading the board precisely rather than reflexively, since overpaying to cover attackers that were never lethal just sinks generic mana into nothing. The prevention is total but creature-only, so it does the work of a defensive blank against combat while doing nothing about burn or other direct damage reaching your face. A targeted, scalable fog is a narrower tool than the flat Fog it descends from, useful precisely when you need to choose which swings matter and you are willing to pay by the head to do it.
