Fervent Strike

The haste rider is what pulls this card out of the usual one-mana pump lane. Most cheap tricks live inside the combat step: you hold them, bluff them, and cast when blocks are declared to steal a trade. This one unhooks from that reactive window by handing a freshly cast creature the ability to swing the turn it lands, which turns a card you would normally hide into a card you deploy to force damage now. First strike is what keeps the +1/+0 from being filler. On an attacker already threatening blockers, it rewrites the combat math against a same-size defender: the buffed creature deals its damage first, so the trade the blocker expected becomes a one-sided kill. Stack the two riders together and the effect reads less like a stat bump and more like a one-mana instruction to attack immediately and win the fight you started. The restraint lives in the numbers. +1/+0 is deliberately modest, so the value is loaded entirely into the keywords rather than the body, and the card wants to go on a creature whose attack already mattered, not one you are scrambling to rescue. That is the design tension it resolves: a trick this cheap defaults to reactive, but the haste rider flips it proactive, giving red aggro a way to convert a topdecked threat into pressure in the same turn it arrives.