Martyrs of Korlis
A defensive answer to the artifact-heavy environment that birthed it, built as a damage-redirection wall rather than a counterspell or a removal piece. The design is unusual on two axes. First, the redirection is passive and conditional on the creature being untapped, which turns the untap step into a strategic checkpoint: tap it to attack, and the shield drops until your next untap. Second, the redirection covers only artifact damage, which in the era of Su-Chi, Triskelion, the Mishra's Factory beatdown, and a thicket of pingers was a meaningful slice of the damage clock without being a blanket prevention effect. The 1/6 body is the rest of the math: enough toughness to soak repeated pings from an artifact source across multiple turns, low enough power that the card is unambiguously a wall pretending to be a Human. What makes the design notable is the choice to express the effect as redirection rather than prevention. Redirection puts the damage somewhere it can accumulate, kill the Martyrs, and end the protection; prevention would have been cleaner and far stronger. That restraint, the willingness to print a sideboard-shaped answer at five mana with a built-in fail state, is characteristic of the period's white defensive design and a useful reference point for how narrowly hate cards were costed before the rate curve steepened.
