Voice of Duty

Protection from green is the entire pitch here, and it tells you exactly what this Angel was built to fence off: the era's monstrous green creatures, the trample beaters and the fight-style removal that defined Urza's-block green. Protection bundles several effects at once (can't be blocked by, targeted, dealt damage by, or enchanted from the named quality), so this body walks through a ground stall, blocks a green attacker in combat and survives, and ignores green's combat tricks entirely. The catch is how narrow the hoser is: protection from a single color is a sideboard-grade ability dressed up on a maindeck creature, useful exactly when the opponent is green and dead weight when they aren't. The 2/2 flying frame is deliberately modest, because the protection clause is the rate, not the stats: a larger body with the same shield would have been a green player's nightmare in a block already wrestling with green's power level. As a piece of design it sits in the long tradition of color-hoser creatures, the protection-from-a-color cycles that stretch back to the game's earliest sets, where the question is never whether the ability is strong but whether the metagame happens to point the right direction.