Shielded Passage

A one-mana Fog with the aperture closed all the way down to a single creature: that scope is the whole bargain. Where a true Fog blanks an entire attack step, this protects one body for one turn, trading breadth for a sharper edge as a combat trick. The instant-speed window is where it earns its keep: cast in response to a burn spell or a damage-based removal effect, it trades one of your cards for one of theirs while keeping the creature on the table, the kind of one-for-one that leaves you up a body. It shines brightest in the combat math itself, where it costs the opponent nothing to walk into: hold it on a high-value blocker and an attacker that should have traded comes away with nothing. Because it prevents all damage to the target rather than granting indestructible, it covers ground indestructible misses (damage from a wither or infect source gets stopped before any -1/-1 counters land), while doing nothing against Doom Blade or a bounce spell. That narrowness is the price of the single white pip. Cards in this family have always had to choose between protecting a creature, protecting a life total, and protecting against the right kind of removal, and this one commits hard to the first: cheap, reactive insurance for a single attacker or blocker, useless when held against the wrong threat and quietly back-breaking when the timing lines up.