Fault Riders

This is one of the purest statements of an inverted-resource era: a set that wanted you to spend lands as a renewable fuel rather than hoard them, and the engine here runs straight on that fuel. Feeding a land to the body yields +2/+0 and first strike, turning a modest 2/2 into a 4/2 that wins the combats it would otherwise trade in. First strike is the load-bearing half of the bonus; it converts sacrificed lands into clean kills rather than mutual destruction, so each pump is worth a removal spell as often as it is worth a swing. The once-per-turn clamp does the structural work that prevents a single explosive alpha strike: you cannot dump your whole battlefield to swing for lethal, because every turn buys exactly one activation. The result is a tightening clock where each point of extra damage costs a rung off your own mana curve. That trade is the design tension this kind of card chased: the land you sacrifice is the land you do not have next turn for a bigger spell, so the engine only makes sense in a deck that has already committed to ending the game before its late game matters. The land-sacrifice subtheme it belonged to never produced a competitive archetype, and this is a fair record of why: an aggressive payoff whose price is the very resource aggression needs to keep flowing.