Achilles Davenport

Freerunning ties the anthem to the assault, and here it closes a loop most tribal lords never bother with. The +1/+1 for your other Assassins is the payoff; connecting in combat with one of those Assassins (or your commander) is what discounts the alternative cost to two mana. That circularity is the design: the lord makes your Assassins better at getting through, and getting through pays for the next lord you cast. Menace on the 3/3 body is not there to enable the discount (a creature just cast cannot attack the turn it arrives); it is there so that once this lord is on the board, it becomes another Assassin the deck can reliably push through, feeding future freerunning casts of its own kind. The tension it resolves is a familiar one for go-wide aggression: anthem effects want to come down early to matter, but early they cost full price and contribute nothing to the attack that turn. Freerunning inverts the sequencing. Rather than a passive payoff sitting on the board waiting to be answered, this is built to be the second or third thing you resolve in a turn where the tribe has already done its work: cheap reinforcement added to a board that is already ahead, rewarding the deck that commits to the swing first and pays for its next lord after the damage is on the board.