Wall of Shadows

Block one attacker, take zero damage back, no matter how the math is pumped: a flat refusal aimed squarely at the combat-trick arms race of its era. The single line of prevention shuts down Giant Growth, lord buffs, and first strike, the pre-modern toolbox of "make my attacker bigger so the chump block fails." (Trample is the one leak in the lock: an attacker with trample still only needs to assign its lethal one damage to the 0/1 Wall, and the prevention stops that single point while the surplus rolls through to the defending player.) The third line is the quieter design beat, and the more telling one: Wall-specific targeting effects were a live lever by the time this was printed, and a Wall that opts out of being a Wall for targeting purposes is an early acknowledgment that the team wanted creature-type-as-target to stay clean. The body is irrelevant (0/1 dies to anything that resolves on it directly), and the double-black on a defensive blocker is steep, but the card is not priced as a body. It is priced as a permanent combat lock against one attacker per turn, in a color that historically does not get to refuse damage at all. A black wall whose entire job is preventing combat damage, in the color of Drain Life and Hypnotic Specter, is a genuine oddity.