Terrifying Presence

Most green prevention effects blank the whole battle: every attacker's damage vanishes, the math resets, nobody connects. This one inverts the geometry by carving out a single exception, preventing all combat damage except the one target's. The targeting is the engine, and it points the opposite way from a removal spell. To stop an opponent's alpha strike you do not name their biggest threat (that would leave it the only thing still dealing damage); you name some other creature, and the entire attack except that one goes dark. Used offensively, you name your own attacker so it lands its hit while everything else whiffs, but note the limit: this grants no evasion, so a blocked creature still deals its damage to the blockers, not to the defending player. It rewards pointing the exception at a creature already in a clean lane. Because it works on the prevention layer rather than destroying anything, it slides past indestructibility and regeneration entirely; nothing dies, the damage simply does not happen. The two-mana instant cost keeps it live as a combat ambush rather than a sorcery-speed plan, and the window is exact: it has to be cast and resolved before the combat damage step, typically in declare blockers, because damage is a turn-based action you cannot interrupt once the damage step begins. The "Fog with one exception" space has stayed largely unexplored since this kind of carve-out first appeared, which is what makes the inverted targeting worth reasoning through rather than filing under generic damage prevention.