Feral Contest

The fight spell that doesn't fight, exactly. Where the green tradition of stapling two creatures together and counting power against toughness goes for symmetrical violence, this one rewrites the combat step instead: it pumps your creature, then compels a specific enemy to step in front of it. The distinction matters because the damage runs on combat rules, not a fixed point of removal. Your creature deals its power to the blocker, the blocker deals its power back, and any first strike, trample, deathtouch, or combat trick on either side resolves inside that exchange. It also drags the lure into a real attack: the forced block happens "this turn," so the bonus counter is a permanent reward whether the duel kills anything or not, and the compelled blocker is pulled out of the defending player's later math. The friction is that the targeted creature only blocks "if able," so a tapped blocker, a grounded creature you're flying over, or a creature already committed elsewhere slips the leash, and you've spent four mana to grow one of your own creatures by a single counter. That conditional is what holds the rate where it sits. It belongs to a small school of green removal-by-combat designs that ask you to win a fight on the battlefield rather than name a target and resolve damage from the stack, and it pays the extra mana for the privilege of choosing the matchup.