Astral Steel

A flat +1/+2 is the kind of pump effect that almost never earns a card slot: too small to swing a race, too narrow to justify the mana. That feebleness is the point. This is a storm spell built to expose what the mechanic actually rewards, which is never the size of the underlying effect but the count it can multiply. Cast it as the tenth spell of a turn and a single attacker swings for a number no fair board survives, every copy either piling onto one creature or fanning out across several. The base effect has to be deliberately weak: the multiplier is the payload, so the thing being multiplied must be cheap enough to fire late in a long chain and small enough that it threatens nothing at storm count one or two. That constraint separates it from the burn-based storm finishers of its era. A burn payoff points at any opponent and needs no board; this one demands a creature already in play to wear the buff, which narrows where it can live but also lets it convert one attacker into lethal combat math. It is storm routed through the combat step rather than storm as direct damage, an early demonstration that the mechanic could be welded to almost any effect and still find a breaking point, provided the effect scaled and a body survived to carry it into the red zone.