Honorable Passage

A protection spell engineered to punish a specific aggressor. The first half is a clean Fog redirected onto a single source: choose the threat, blank its biggest hit, walk away unharmed. The second half is where the design shows its teeth, and where the period it came from is legible in the card. Against a red source, the prevented damage rebounds onto that source's controller, turning a burn spell or an attacking dragon into a self-inflicted wound. This is hate built into a maindeckable shape, a quiet hedge against the aggressive red decks that dominated the era's metagames. The architecture is deliberate: the prevention names a source, not a target, so the spell sits between any incoming damage and whatever it was pointed at, while the punishment clause stays narrow enough that it never warps into an all-purpose burn answer. The window matters too: at instant speed, it can be held until the threat is on the stack or attackers are declared, so the choice of source happens with strong information. The single-source restriction is the discipline that prices it: it cannot blunt a board full of attackers; it answers one thing, and against the right color, it answers that thing twice. A color-pie statement as much as a card: white pays to survive, and when the source is red, white makes the aggressor pay for the privilege of attacking.