Aspiring Champion

The keyword hides a build-around inside a beater. Connect once and the body is spent: it sacrifices itself as part of its own trigger and converts into whatever creature surfaces off the top of your library. Ruinous Ascension is a self-immolating cascade gated on combat damage, so the payoff is only ever as good as the deck behind it. A random topdeck stapled to a 3/3 with menace is a coin flip; a library seeded with Demons and expensive bombs turns it into a one-shot cheat that pays for the whole board state the moment the damage lands. The Demon rider is the deliberate reward that keeps the ability pointed at a specific build rather than dropped into any red deck: reveal a Demon and the trigger tacks on a burn spell that hits each opponent for the creature's power, an asymmetrical blast that never touches your own life total. That clause quietly rewrites the math on high-cost fatties that would otherwise be too slow to hardcast. The cost is stated honestly. You spend an attack, the attacker itself, and the risk of whiffing on your curve, all for the upside of dropping a haymaker onto the battlefield for no mana. Menace exists to make the damage connect, since the whole engine is dead if the attacker gets chumped. Think of it less as a red creature you play for its stats and more as a combat-triggered dig that happens to swing.