Eye for an Eye

Retributive damage predates most of the color pie's modern shape, and this instant expresses it about as cleanly as it has ever been done: a white spell that sets up a replacement effect on an incoming hit, then mirrors that hit back not onto the source but onto the player controlling it. The mechanism is the design's whole point. You do not redirect the damage, you do not prevent it, you do not negate the source; you take the hit yourself and pass an equal one back to the person behind it. The source is chosen as the spell resolves, which is the subtle window the card lives in: you cast it in response to a threat, but you are committing to a replacement effect that only pays off if that specific source actually connects this turn. If the source dies first, or the damage gets prevented by something else, the retaliation never fires. The card answers player damage while looking like a combat trick, structurally strange for a color whose damage-mitigation tools (Healing Salve, the various Circles of Protection) had been built around stopping the damage rather than monetizing it. White retribution effects that follow descend from this template, and the lineage clarifies what makes the original unusual: it treats its own life total as a resource to spend on punishment rather than a number to defend.