Brallin, Skyshark Rider

A discard payoff built to end games rather than just sift a graveyard, this pairs two familiar red engines in one body: the "whenever you discard" trigger and a threat that grows every time you throw a card away. The design coheres because each discarded card does double duty: Brallin gains a +1/+1 counter while every opponent takes a point, so a rummaging or cycling shell quietly converts card selection into a repeatable clock across a table full of players. That ping is the closer, not a rounding error, in a color that has historically struggled to reach opponents it cannot burn out in a single line.

The partnership with Shabraz, the Skyshark is subtler than a shared trigger, and describing it that way gets the engine wrong. Shabraz cares about drawing cards, not discarding them; Brallin cares about discarding, not drawing. What binds them is the loot: any effect that draws then discards feeds both halves of the pair off a single action, turning ordinary card filtering into two counters and a table-wide point of damage. The trample-granting activation reads like an afterthought until a Shark that has ballooned all game runs into a wall of blockers and needs its damage to land. Discard-as-resource has a long red lineage, from hellbent aggression to later cycling-matters payoffs; the wrinkle here is that Brallin monetizes the act of discarding itself, not the empty hand or the cards in the yard, so the premium is on outlets that let you pitch cards at will.