Wall of Light

Protection from black on a five-toughness wall is a snapshot of the era's threat environment. In 1994, the format's premier removal was Terror, the premier creature was a swarm of black weenies backed by Hypnotic Specter, and the premier finisher was often a black evasion threat punching through. A 1/5 defender that Terror cannot touch, that blocks a ground-based black attacker all day, and that no Drain Life can profitably target is not a generic blocker: it is a precisely tuned answer to a single color's gameplan, sold at the wall rate. The design template (cheap defensive creature with protection from the format's dominant color) became a recurring sideboard tool across the next decade, but the early printings wore their target on their sleeve. Wall of Light is not trying to be flexible. It is trying to make the black deck across the table feel like it has wasted its removal slots, and it asks three mana to do it. The five toughness matters more than the one power suggests: it puts the wall above the reach of every common black burn-equivalent of the period and most of the era's combat damage, which is the whole point of pricing protection onto a body that cannot attack.