Pariah
The redirection is total: every point of damage headed for your life total lands on one creature instead, combat damage from unblocked attackers included, so an opponent cannot route around the enchanted body to reach you. The damage simply goes somewhere else. The price of that immunity is that the whole defense hangs on a single permanent staying on the battlefield; this is an all-or-nothing structure, not a defensive cushion. The conventional play is to enchant something that shrugs off the incoming fire, which is why the card has long paired with indestructible bodies and with creatures that regenerate, where a single replacement effect cleans off the absorbed damage and turns a burn spell or an alpha strike into wasted mana. The sharper line enchants a creature whose absorbed damage feeds a payoff, stapling a one-card wall to the seed of a kill. Its limits are exactly where you would expect: kill the enchanted creature and the wall evaporates, and it stops nothing that ends a game without dealing damage to you (mill, decking, life-loss effects, alternate win conditions). This is clean redirection design, white deciding where damage goes rather than how much, and a pattern the game has revisited whenever it wants a defensive shell that can quietly double as a combo enabler.

Rules text
Format Status
More formatsFewer formats
Other printings
- Secret Lair Drop#1839
- Breaking News#5
- The List#10E-33
- Salvat 2011#16
- Tenth Edition#33
- Tenth Edition#33★
- Seventh Edition#30
- Seventh Edition#30★








