Wishmonger

Protection is normally a defensive privilege: the spell that grants it belongs to the controller, who decides when a creature dodges removal or shrugs off a blocker. This 3/3 turns that privilege into shared infrastructure, a switch sitting in the middle of the table that costs two generic mana and answers to no single player. The effect is the standard protection package (a creature gains protection from a color of its controller's choice until end of turn, removing it from a spell on the stack, fizzling an aura, blanking a blocker, or stripping combat damage), but the open activation rewrites who gets to use it and against whom. Your opponent can pay to slip a key attacker past your removal as easily as you can pay to save your own. The board state stops asking "can I protect this" and starts asking "who blinks first," a question of mana and willingness rather than ownership. That premise (abilities anyone could activate) was a recurring texture of the Monger creatures from this early-era set, which leaned on shared switches as a design motif rather than a one-off oddity. The body is forgettable; the contested public utility bolted onto it is doing something the game almost never tries, handing the defender's best trick to everyone at once and letting the table negotiate over it.