Cloak of Confusion
An attempt to fold black's hand attack into the combat step, from an era when discard ran almost entirely through sorcery-speed effects like Hymn to Tourach and Mind Twist. The design idea is to convert combat damage into resource denial: instead of pushing damage through, an unblocked creature can swallow its hit and strip a random card from the defending player's hand. The trick is that the trigger only fires when the creature goes unblocked, which inverts ordinary combat logic. Now the defender has a reason to throw a chump at an attacker they might otherwise have let through, because eating two damage can be cheaper than losing a card at random. The Aura turns every attack into a small bluff about which outcome the attacker actually wants, and the "you may" clause lets you cash the discard or take the damage on each swing. But the same combat-step dependency that defines the card also caps it: the discard needs a body that connects, so it leans on the opponent declining to block, and Aura-based card disadvantage compounds the risk, since a single removal spell answers both the enchantment and its host. The result reads as clever rather than efficient, the kind of repeatable hand attack black would later route through cheaper, body-independent designs that did not stake the effect on a combat math problem first.


