Strength of Isolation

The reason this Aura escapes the dead-weight trap that every protection-granting Aura carries (a reactive answer that demands a proactive, card-spending commitment, useless in hand the moment you draw it with nothing worth shielding) is the discard clause. Madness reroutes that liability. The catch is timing: madness fires the instant the card leaves your hand, so there is no holding it in exile to cast later. To turn it into something resembling a flash-speed save, you need an instant-speed discard outlet pointed at it exactly when black removal goes on the stack. Do that, and a sorcery-speed Aura becomes a one-mana response to the very spell it was built to blank, deployed at a window Auras almost never operate in. Absent an instant-speed outlet, the reactive save never comes online: a deck without that enabler is just discarding it at sorcery speed, committing before knowing whether it needs it. The protection itself does the expected work, voiding single-target black kill spells like Terror and walking a creature through black blockers, with the +1/+2 as the small bonus the clause throws in. Mind the seam, though: protection guards the creature, so edict effects that make the player choose a sacrifice cut straight past it. The printed cost is the version you settle for; the madness cost, unlocked by the right enabler, is the whole reason to run it.