Zealous Inquisitor
Damage redirection is a rare design lever, and this Cleric pulls it one tick at a time. The activation reshapes a combat-math problem most white creatures cannot touch: when damage would hit this body, the next point of it gets shunted onto a creature you choose instead. Paid repeatedly within a turn, it becomes a slow, mana-hungry pinger that can also save itself from a one-damage spell or chip down a blocker before combat resolves. The catch is built into the wording: each activation only moves the next increment, so turning it into a real removal tool means paying again and again, and the redirect lives entirely on damage that would have hit this creature, not on free-floating burn. That tethering is what keeps a repeatable damage source from running away: you have to be willing to put a 2/2 in harm's way, or feed it incoming pings, before it does anything offensive. It rewards a board state where small damage is already flying around (token swarms, X/1 attackers, other pingers) and does very little in a vacuum. The result is a fiddly, deliberately gated effect that reads stranger than it plays: a piece of white's early experimentation with damage prevention and redirection as a defensive idiom rather than a kill-everything one.


