Captain Ripley Vance

The third-spell trigger is the load-bearing constraint here, and it is doing something more specific than "cast a lot of spells." Storm counts every spell you have cast this turn; Vance counts only the third one, and pays out once per turn on that exact beat. That single-shot ceiling per turn is what keeps her honest: she does not scale with a twenty-spell chain, she rewards you for reliably threading three castings across many turns, growing incrementally each time she fires. Because the payout is damage equal to her power, and firing the trigger raises that power first, the counter and the burn are the same event: the third spell makes her bigger and then throws that new number at any target. Point it at a face for a spellslinger clock or at the board as repeatable removal; the flexibility of "any target" is what turns a build-around into an engine that also plays defense. The friction is that a 3/2 body dies to almost anything before the counters accumulate, so the deck around her has to protect the growth curve rather than just enable the count. Red has printed spell-count payoffs before (Young Pyromancer's token flood, Kessig Flamebreather pings, Electrostatic Field chip damage), but where those pay out flat per spell, Vance folds the counter and the burst into one accelerating loop, which is the tighter design.