Tamiyo's Safekeeping

The one-mana protection instant that folds two different jobs onto a single permanent. Green's earlier defensive spells tended to specialize: Blossoming Defense and Vines of Vastwood bump a creature and grant hexproof to dodge targeted removal, while Heroic Intervention leans on indestructible to survive sweepers. This bundles both modes, hexproof to slip targeted removal, indestructible to walk through a board wipe or a damage-based sweeper, so one card answers a spot-removal spell and a wrath with equal ease. The quiet reach is the target line: "target permanent you control" rather than "creature." It can shield a manland mid-swing, an artifact or enchantment engine, or a token-maker the opponent hoped to pick off, not only the creature they expected to target. The two life is incidental upside, a nod to green's habit of stapling small lifegain onto its tricks; the real design work is the flexibility of that target line at a single green mana. Its blind spots are worth knowing: it does nothing against an edict, since forced-sacrifice effects target the player rather than the permanent, and indestructible does not save a planeswalker from combat, since loyalty loss and the zero-loyalty state-based check are not "destroy" effects at all. Priced this low, it shares the interaction window with a combat trick while functioning as insurance, which forces a choice on the opponent: commit removal into a possible blowout, or hold back and let the mana go unspent. That ambiguity is the payoff, a protection spell cheap enough to leave up while still developing a real threat.