Protective Sphere
Enchantment
, Pay 1 life: Prevent all damage that would be dealt to you this turn by a source of your choice that shares a color with the mana spent on this activation cost. (Colorless mana prevents no damage.)
- CMC
- 3
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- W
- Rarity
- common
- Set
- Invasion
- Price
- $0.15
- EDHREC rank
- #24805
Protective Sphere lets you pay one mana of any color to give your whole board protection from a chosen color until end of turn — a one-sided fog against a single-color threat stapled to an enchantment that never goes away. The activation cost is trivially cheap, but the effect is narrow enough that it only earns a slot in decks that specifically fear color-based sweepers or have a recursive gameplan that needs to survive them.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | not legal |
| pioneer | not legal |
| standard | not legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
In Commander, Protective Sphere is a niche answer to color-specific board wipes like Wrath of God or Blasphemous Act — if you know your meta runs heavy on one color of removal, it buys your entire board a turn of immunity for a single mana. Outside Commander, it sees essentially no play: Legacy and Vintage have faster and more flexible protection options, and Pauper has access to the same card but the creature-light enchantment-centric builds where it would matter rarely show up in that format's aggro-defined metagame. Protective Sphere is a Commander-only consideration, and even there it's a sideboard-style answer dressed as a permanent.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.15 bulk tier
At $0.15, Protective Sphere is deep bulk — you're paying almost nothing for a card with a very specific use case. It won't appreciate; pick it up if the effect fits your deck and don't think twice about the cost.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.