Shimian Night Stalker

Redirection as a black design idiom, written longhand in an era before keywords did this kind of work for you. The activated ability rewrites combat math by interposing the Nightstalker between you and one attacker: damage that would land on your life total lands on a 4/4 body instead. Because the ability targets an attacking creature, it can only be used during combat, after attackers are declared and before damage resolves; it is a mid-combat answer to a threat already on the board, not a pre-combat declaration. It is not a blocker (the controller never makes a blocking decision and the attacker never becomes blocked), and the redirection covers all damage from that creature, including trample, first strike, and any damage triggers that would resolve against the player. Modern templating would still spell this out as damage redirection rather than collapse it into a keyword, and the effect now reads more naturally in white, where preventing and reassigning combat damage became color-pie home turf. The cost is the squeeze: five mana for the body, then black mana and the creature's tap every time you want to point it, with no protection for the Nightstalker itself once it has volunteered. A card that reads as a curiosity now but documents how black once paid for defensive utility, before the color pie settled on black mostly killing things instead.