Balduvian War-Makers

Rampage was Alliances-era Wizards trying to make a defensive mechanic out of an aggressive premise: a creature that grows when gang-blocked, daring the opponent to throw bodies at it. The math rarely worked in the card's favor. Rampage 1 only pays out for blockers beyond the first, so a single chump shuts the keyword off entirely, and any opponent who can afford to lose just one creature pays nothing extra. The keyword punishes exactly the play (multi-blocking) that a defender chooses only when the attacker is already threatening lethal, which is precisely when the bonus matters least. Pairing that with haste at five mana for a 3/3 produces a creature that wants to come down swinging immediately, before the board clogs, because once blockers accumulate the rampage incentive collapses into a coin flip the opponent controls. That tension (haste pushing for early aggression, rampage rewarding a late-game combat math that almost never favors the controller) is why rampage was a short-lived experiment rather than a recurring keyword. Wizards revisited the "reward for being blocked" design later with cleaner tools: trample sidesteps the blocker count entirely, and modern menace forces multi-blocking rather than merely hoping for it. This is a fossil from the period before those answers existed, when the design team was still mapping how combat-math incentives could be turned into a creature's selling point.