Duchess, Wayward Tavernkeep

Combat damage is the toll gate here, and the whole engine is priced around aggression paying rent twice. Connecting with a creature stamps a quest counter onto that creature, but the counter is inert until you spend it: one mana converts a quest counter from any permanent into a Junk token, which then wants its own tap-and-sacrifice to exile and cash in. The design layers three separate acts (hit, convert, spend) between combat and card advantage, which is a slower path to gas than red usually accepts. Red's normal card-draw levers are rummaging and impulse-style exile-and-play; this asks you to build a counter economy first and collect later. The Junk token is impulse draw wearing an artifact's clothes: you exile the top card and get one turn to play it, so the payoff rewards a low, fast curve that can actually deploy what it finds. There is a real wrinkle in the geometry, though: spending a counter reaches across your whole board, since the ability removes one from any permanent you control, so counters earned by different attackers pool into a single shared bank you can unload at once to flood the table with Junk. As a red card whose reward scales with unblocked attackers connecting rather than raw damage totals, it wants a wide, evasive board and a mana sink to turn tempo into a grinding fuel supply, a genuinely different shape than the burn-and-goldfish plan red usually settles into.