Tidal Wave
A defensive instant priced as a flicker of breathing room, not a permanent fortification. The body it makes is sizeable, but it evaporates before your next turn, which puts the entire value of the card in a single combat phase: you cast it during an attack to soak a swing, ambush a creature that has committed, or buy one extra turn while you assemble a real board. The forced end-step sacrifice is the design discipline that keeps a five-toughness flash blocker honest; strip that clause and you are left with a permanent 5/5 wall at instant speed for three mana, a far stickier rate than the era intended to hand out. Defender means the token never threatens to swing back, so it functions purely as a one-shot insurance policy. The closest relative in spirit is Fog, except here you answer combat by physically being there rather than by canceling the damage outright: instead of blunting a whole attack, you stand a wall in front of one attacker and dare the opponent to trade into it. The catch is that everything has to happen now. There is little banking the wall for a future turn, little chump-blocking across multiple combats, little holding it up as a lasting deterrent. You pay full price for a single window, and the card lives or dies on whether you read that window correctly.
