Avatar of Slaughter
A forced-combat engine that hands its rule to everyone at once: every creature gains double strike, and every creature has to attack each combat. The symmetry is the whole point. It belongs to the old "everyone fights" school of red, the Grand Melee lineage that strips the option to sit back and turns a stalled board into a mandatory brawl, but it folds that effect onto a body big enough to win the brawl it starts. In a forced-attack standoff the math collapses to one question: who has the most favorable blocks and the biggest creatures? An 8/8 with double strike is rarely on the losing end of those exchanges, which is why the player who casts it usually intends to be the one cashing in the combat it compels. It punishes the pillow-fort player who was banking on nobody swinging, and it punishes the durdle who built a board of value engines rather than a board that can fight. Once it resolves, the political layer of the table evaporates; nobody gets to decline the attacks they were never given a choice about, and the last creature standing settles it. The 8/8 is not the finisher so much as the tiebreaker that makes the symmetry asymmetric in your favor.




