Endrider Spikespitter

Speed asks a red deck to prove it can inflict life loss, and this Mercenary is engineered to be both the toll booth and the reward waiting on the far side. The Start your engines! clause parks you at speed 1 the instant it lands, and each of your turns where an opponent bleeds ratchets you one notch toward the cap of 4. Get there and you unlock a repeatable impulse draw each upkeep: the top card of your library, exiled and playable that turn. That is red's native card advantage, tempo you either spend immediately or forfeit, rather than a hand you get to bank. The wrinkle is that speed accrues slowly by design and the payoff arrives only at max, so a fragile body would spend several turns doing nothing but waiting to become relevant. Reach and a 3/4 frame answer that problem directly: it holds a lane against fliers, blocks ground attackers without folding, and survives most of the early burn that would otherwise strand your engine at speed 2. The stat line is defensive on purpose so the ability can be greedy. It rewards a board already tilting the game rather than one still hunting for its first point of damage, which is precisely the phase where a red deck wants to be converting a lead into fresh gas rather than running out of it.