Callaphe, Beloved of the Sea

The devotion payoff usually sits on the biggest body: a fatty whose power balloons as your board fills with pips. This one inverts the priority. Its own power still scales with devotion to blue, but the load-bearing line is the anthem it hands the rest of the team: a flat one-mana tax on every targeted spell your opponents aim at your creatures and enchantments. The tax does not scale; it is always exactly one more per permanent targeted, regardless of how many pips you have committed or how wide the board runs. What scales is the reach of it. A board of many small permanents means many separate one-mana surcharges, so an opponent trying to dismantle you piecemeal pays the fee again and again, while a single fatty offers just one surface to tax. The design logic couples two payoffs to the same investment: the blue symbols you commit to build a permanents-heavy board are the same symbols growing the demigod, but the protective aura itself stays a constant tax. That constancy is what keeps it fair. A tax is not a shield: a determined opponent simply pays the extra mana, and any mass removal that names no target walks straight past the entire lattice. It rewards the deck that wants a spread of permanents rather than one threat, a different axis from most devotion demigods, and the reason it reads less like a finisher than a keystone the rest of the board grows around.