Heroism

A hate card aimed at a single color, built in the era when Wizards still designed for a metagame defined by what your opponent was playing rather than by raw power level. The design logic is pure asymmetry: it taxes only attacking red creatures, demanding a heavy per-attacker payment to push damage through, and it leaves blockers and noncombat plans untouched. Note what the rate buys and what it costs. There is no upkeep, no recurring drain on its controller; the toll only applies in combat, against red, and only when you spend a white creature to fire it. That sacrifice clause is the brake. Each activation is a one-shot that eats a body, so the card is not a wall you set and forget but a resource you ration, one combat step at a time, against the specific board in front of you. The "for each attacking red creature" scaling is what makes it a genuine fog against a wide red board: every attacker has to pay or whiff, and a deck flooding the table pays the most. What dates it is how narrow and color-locked its answer is: the sort of sideboard-style hate that once lived in the main set itself, a card whose entire reason to exist is that someone, somewhere, was attacking with too many red creatures.