Goblin Lyre
A finisher built on a wager, and the wager is the whole point. Most damage payoffs in red and white want a guaranteed conversion: you assemble the board, you push it through. This one hands you a coin flip instead, and the symmetry of the failure case is what gives it teeth. Win, and your creature count becomes a direct damage strike; lose, and the same arithmetic runs backward, with the opponent's board count burning you. The design reads the table both ways: the payoff scales with your width, but the downside scales with theirs, so the wager is sharpest in a mirror of full boards and dullest when one side has been swept. This is chance-as-balancing-mechanism design at its most literal, the same logic that prices raw power against a coin flip in cards like Mana Clash. The sacrifice clause is the other half of the math: this is a one-shot, so it asks to be the closing move of a committed board rather than a repeatable engine, and there is no value play here beyond dumping it before it can be answered. What keeps it on the fringe is that the variance never resolved in the player's favor often enough to justify staking the game on a flip you could lose at exactly the wrong moment. It captures a moment in design when "flip a coin" still counted as a legitimate cost for a potential alpha-strike from the artifact slot.
