Blazing Specter

For a few years this was the gold standard for what an aggressive Rakdos two-color body could do, and the reason is how cleanly it stacks pressure on a single creature. Flying clears the ground; haste means the discard clock starts the turn it lands; and the combat trigger turns every connect into a free single-card strip, peeling an answer from a hand already short on ways to deal with a 2/2 in the air. The lineage matters: black had given Specters this combat-discard since Hypnotic Specter in Alpha, but that one sat still the turn it arrived and gave the opponent a clean turn cycle to find a removal spell before the discards started. Splashing red bought the haste and the urgency, converting a fragile evasive nuisance into a creature that demanded an immediate response or stripped your plan apart over three swings. Fragility is the tax: it dies to almost everything, so the play pattern is to deploy it into a window where the opponent is tapped out or behind, then cash the discard before they recover. That tension (a must-answer threat that any answer kills) is exactly what makes it play like a tempo spell stapled to a body rather than a creature you commit to the board for value. It set the template that later disruptive fliers kept circling back to.