Captain Howler, Sea Scourge
Discard is usually a cost in blue-red: you loot away dead lands, you rummage for gas, you dig through your deck and pay for it in cards. This inverts the transaction. Every card sent to the yard pumps a target creature by +2/+0, so the loots and rummages a spellslinger deck already wants to cast become combat math. The wrinkle is in how the two triggers fire. The pump scales with the number of cards discarded at once, meaning a spell that pitches two hands you a +4/+0 swing in a single trigger; the delayed draw, by contrast, keys off the discard event, not each card, so it repays you with a single card when the pumped creature connects. Discard broadly to size the attack, then reload one at a time by hitting. The 5/4 body is genuinely threatening unbuffed, and the ward tax (two mana plus two life) is deliberately cheap on its own: it does not make the creature hard to answer so much as it makes answering it awkward at the precise moment the pump is about to resolve, forcing a removal spell to spend mana it would rather hold. This is discard-as-resource design carried to its endpoint, the payoff that finally makes emptying your hand the plan rather than the price of digging for one.




