Ancestors' Aid

Combat tricks live and die on tempo: you spend a card in the moment, and if the swing does not land, you are down one for nothing. This one hedges against that by leaving a Treasure behind. The +2/+0 and first strike are a familiar "win the block, blow out the trade" package, exactly the effect that has priced red pump spells for years. What changes the calculus is the residual mana: even when the trick whiffs or trades even, the Treasure recoups part of the cost, smooths the next turn's curve, or fixes a splash you were about to be short on. That shifts a purely tempo-negative card toward a wash, a genuinely different risk profile for a two-mana instant. The trade-off is on the front end: first strike plus +2/+0 makes it a real combat threat but not a hard rescue, so it wins races and punishes attackers rather than saving a creature from a larger removal spell. Held rather than spent, the Treasure also doubles as a ritual-in-waiting for whatever color the turn demands, a small burst of fixing you can bank instead of deploy. The whole thing reflects red's slow drift away from pure aggression toward spells that stay relevant when the beatdown plan stalls out.