Choking Tethers

Onslaught's cycling cards were built around a single idea: the floor should never be a dead card, and the ceiling should be worth holding. This one solves that with two effects that don't overlap. Held to its full price, it taps a Fog's worth of attackers (up to four) at instant speed, swinging a combat math problem you couldn't otherwise touch. Drawn late or against a board you don't fear, it cycles for a card and still nicks one creature on the way out, courtesy of the cycling trigger that taps a single target. That trigger is the design's real cleverness: cycling normally pays you only in cardflow, but stapling a minor tempo effect to the discard means the cheap mode is never a pure concession. You replace the card and shave a blocker or an attacker, all for two mana. The split keeps the card honest at both ends. You rarely want to spend four mana to tap four creatures, and you rarely have nothing better to do than cycle for one tap, but the option to do either, decided on the turn that matters, is what justifies the slot. It is a blueprint Onslaught used across colors, and a clean illustration of why cycling-with-a-trigger aged better than vanilla cycling: the second line of text turns a relief valve into a real decision.