Hellish Rebuke

A deterrent that works by editing the enemy board rather than your own. For one turn, every permanent an opponent controls picks up a suicide clause: if it deals damage to you, it dies and its controller loses two life. The elegance is that the punishment lands squarely on the aggressor. It is the attacker's creatures that get sacrificed, the attacker who eats the two-point tick, so the card converts a moment where you are exposed into a tax the other player must pay to have swung at all. It does not fog the damage or redirect it; it lets the swing land and then collects. Because the granted trigger keys off damage dealt to you specifically, it reaches past combat to punish pingers and other permanent-based damage sources an opponent might use to chip you down. The natural home is the black deck that wants to be the least appealing target at a crowded table, buying not board advantage but a shift in threat assessment: the players who commit to attacking you this turn find their board thinned and their life totals dented in exchange. Cast at instant speed, it lives in the reactive window, resolved once attackers are declared so the retribution is already active by the time damage would be dealt. Unlike a standing redirect in the vein of Pariah, it protects for a single turn only. The trade is deliberate: one window of retaliation in exchange for the memory of what it cost to test you.