Gaze of Pain

A sorcery that turns the combat step into a removal phase, cast in your main phase before attackers are even declared. That timing is the whole story: the opponent watches the gaze resolve and knows exactly what's coming when they sit down to decide their blocks. So this isn't a trick that ambushes a defender; it's a tax laid out in the open. The card converts an unblocked attacker's connection into targeted creature damage, but choosing to fire costs that attacker its face damage for the turn. You're trading a swing at the player for the ability to point your creature's power at something that declined to trade. The natural target is the board that holds creatures back: when the opponent leaves a small defensive line up and waves your attacker through, betting you'd rather race their life total, the gaze lets you snipe the utility creature or chump-blocker they refused to spend, punishing exactly the player who tries to keep an unblocking board intact. Because the redirect uses the attacker's power as it stands in combat, every aura, equipment, and counter you've stacked onto that creature scales the removal, which is why the soft-looking rate plays sharper than it reads. An early experiment in welding the combat step to a removal effect, written before Wizards had settled on the cleaner fight-and-bite templating later cards would standardize, and clumsier for it: the sorcery speed gives away the surprise a true combat trick would keep.