Lancers en-Kor

The damage-redirection clause is the engine, and the genius is not the redirection itself but the price: zero mana, no cap on activations. The en-Kor share this defensive shield, shunting incoming damage to a friendly creature before it lands. Read on a single body, it looks like a way to keep a 3/3 alive in combat. Combo players read the activation differently: the cost means the ability can be activated, and crucially can target, an unlimited number of times for free. That is the whole exploit. Each activation is a targeting event, and a creature that does something whenever it becomes the target of an ability turns this into an infinite trigger pump. Cephalid Illusionist mills your library with every point you point at it; Task Force grows without bound. The damage redirection is incidental to those loops: nothing is ever actually dealt, because the activations happen at instant speed before any damage exists. The body is filler, and Stronghold priced it that way; a five-mana 3/3 with trample is not why anyone reaches for this. The interaction is the entire story. The takeaway is about how a mana-free, limit-free ability framed as purely defensive reads as harmless until you notice that "free" plus "repeatable" plus "targets" is a building block, not a safety valve.