Yeah. That's a rough ability. Consequently, I made it hard to cast, and on a small bodied creature, while still keeping it at a relevant casting cost. I suppose I could have increased the cost to 6+... but then there would be a temptation to make the creature a 3/3+... I don't know... I never had a problem with this card when we drafted it, but I don't know if that's really a good guage of how dangerous the card is.

I would think it's going to have slightly less impact in draft; where you're less likely to be up against a mono-coloured deck, or have two of them.

Constructed, where you can have multiples of this and protect them? Potentially very nasty to be up against; but on the flip side, if your opponent can't deal with a CMC4 critical combo component, then they're going to lose to SOMEthing.

It's almost as harsh a colour hoser as Iona, Shield of Emeria. But fortunately not quite as harsh as her. The cost is sensible though. I've had many red/x decks where the only creature removal is red, say, and this would punish the red half of those quite effectively.

The guardinal itself doesn't have the protection (natively, anyway) so red creature removal would come in very handy against it :)

Ha, true. Easy to misread. OK, this is only going to be really annoying against monogreen, or some badly prepared monowhite or monoblue players.