Duel Tactics

A single point of damage is rarely the story; the "can't block this turn" rider is. This is a red pinger wearing the clothes of a combat enabler: the damage picks off an X/1, but the real payload is stripping a blocker off defense so an attack punches through unimpeded. Red has long borrowed the tempo of forcing creatures out of the blocking step, whether by shrinking, tapping, or explicitly denying a block, and this compresses that job into a single red mana. The flashback is what raises it from a marginal trick to a repeatable resource: clear a blocker now, then buy it back for a slightly higher cost later in the same game to run the sequence again, exiling only after the second use. That two-charge structure rewards a deck that wants to attack across successive turns rather than empty its hand at once, since each casting is a small tax on the opponent's defensive math and the graveyard holds the reserve charge until the tempo is worth spending. The ceiling is modest by design (one damage, one creature, one turn of vulnerability), and that ceiling is exactly what keeps something this flexible priced where it is. It is aggression's small-ball tool: not a game-ender, but a dependable way to convert board presence into unblocked damage twice from one card.