Protection from color has never been distributed evenly across Magic's five colors. Some colors have received the ability dozens of times over the game's history, while others have only seen it on a handful of cards ever printed.
Across the roughly 200 cards carrying the protection keyword, white sits at the top by a wide margin, making up over a third of every protection card ever printed.
This guide walks through the real numbers and explains the color-pie logic Wizards of the Coast has used to decide which colors get this ability and how often.
Understanding the distribution also helps explain why certain colors are much easier to build a protection-focused deck around than others.
White accounts for roughly 35 percent of all cards with the protection keyword, by far the largest share of any single color. This lines up with white's broader color-pie identity as the color of efficient, hard-to-remove creatures and defensive answers.
White Knight and countless other white creatures across Magic's history lean on protection to survive combat and dodge removal, reinforcing the color's reputation for resilience.
Green sits at roughly 14 percent of all protection cards, a notably smaller share than white but still meaningfully ahead of the remaining three colors. Green's version of protection often appears alongside big, expensive creatures meant to survive long enough to close out a game.
Green's protection creatures also frequently target colors green struggles against directly, such as protection from red or black, reflecting the color's traditional rivalries on the color pie.
Black comes in at around 13 percent of protection cards, often paired with black's reanimation and sacrifice themes. Black creatures with protection tend to skew toward surviving specifically against white's removal-heavy toolkit, mirroring the historical Black Knight design.
This pairing makes sense thematically, since white and black have been positioned as rival colors since Magic's earliest sets.
Red sits at roughly 8 percent and blue at just under 7 percent, making them by far the least likely colors to receive protection from color. Blue's identity leans more toward countering and bouncing threats rather than making them hard to remove directly, which naturally reduces its need for protection.
Red's aggressive, low-curve philosophy also doesn't pair naturally with a defensive keyword like protection, since red creatures are generally expected to trade in combat rather than dodge it.
Multicolored cards make up roughly 17 percent of all protection printings, a share large enough to be worth noting on its own. Gold cards with protection often combine two colors' rivalries into a single, more flexible protection package, similar in spirit to the Swords equipment cycle.
Colorless cards, meanwhile, account for under 6 percent, reflecting how tightly protection is tied to Magic's color identity system overall.
If you're building a deck specifically around protection synergies, white and green offer by far the deepest card pools to draw from. Red and blue players looking for the effect will likely need to lean on equipment, such as the Sword cycle, rather than creatures with the ability built in.
Knowing this distribution in advance saves a lot of wasted deckbuilding time searching for protection creatures in colors that simply don't offer very many.
Protection's white-heavy distribution stands out even more once you compare it against Magic's other defensive keywords. Hexproof and shroud, for example, both lean much more heavily toward green and blue than white, showing just how differently Wizards of the Coast treats each individual defensive tool across the color pie.
That contrast is a useful reminder that no single color owns every kind of defensive design space, even though white clearly dominates this specific one, and it's a good example of why a deckbuilder's choice of color often depends on which specific flavor of resilience they actually want, rather than assuming every defensive keyword is distributed the same way white's protection is, a mistake that trips up even experienced deckbuilders switching colors for the first time.
White, at roughly 35 percent of all protection printings.
Blue, at just under 7 percent.
Yes, and they make up about 17 percent of all protection cards.
Its identity leans toward countering and bouncing rather than direct resilience.
If you're leaning into a white or green protection shell, keeping those creatures organized by color makes deckbuilding much faster. A Magnetic One Touch Card Holder 25-Pack is a great way to keep your best protection singles individually secured.
EVORETRO Premium Card Sleeves work well for the rest of the deck while you build out your protection-heavy shell.
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