Kjeldoran Royal Guard

A defensive piece built around a single, unusual conversion: tap it, and every point of combat damage your opponent's unblocked creatures would deal to you that turn is rerouted onto the Guard instead. The intent is a wall that doesn't just stop one attacker but absorbs an entire turn's worth of unblocked offense, funneling the whole swing onto one body. The friction is the 2/5 frame: it can soak exactly five before it dies, and the redirection is all-or-nothing across the turn, so a board wide enough to push more than five damage kills the Guard outright (though the player still takes nothing that turn, since the replacement effect moves all of the damage, not just the first five). That ceiling is what kept it honest in an era when white's defensive tools leaned on raw toughness and chump-blocking rather than this kind of routed-damage trick. The tap cost also means it defends one turn at a time and can't both block and redirect comfortably, framing it as a stabilizer for a controlling white shell rather than a freestanding answer. The card sits among a cluster of designs from this period that experimented with redirecting combat damage onto a chosen permanent, a design lever Magic mostly set aside once changes to how combat damage resolves reshaped how such tricks worked. As early white design, it's a snapshot of how the color tried to buy time before lifegain and mass removal became its standard tools.