Outmaneuver

Damage assignment trickery is one of combat's oldest mind games, and this is the scalable version: pour mana into X, and that many of your attackers shove their damage straight past the wall they were supposed to die to. The design lives in a narrow window. It only matters during the declare-blockers step, after the defender has committed bodies to chump or trade, and it rewrites where that damage lands without removing the blocker or changing any numbers. The blocker still deals its damage back; your creature still takes it. You're not saving your attackers, you're punishing the opponent for blocking at all, turning a clean defensive turn into a face full of damage they thought they'd contained. The X structure is what gives it reach: a single fog-breaker on one creature is marginal, but a board-wide alpha strike where every blocked attacker suddenly connects becomes lethal. That makes it a payoff for going wide rather than a generic trick. Trample does most of this work more cleanly on a single big creature, which is why this kind of effect has always lived at the edges; its niche is the swarm that can't afford to trade evenly, and the whole sequence depends on baiting a full block before the mana goes in. It rewards patience: dead weight against a clear board, devastating the moment the defender decides it has the math under control.