Honor the God-Pharaoh
Card advantage in mono-red usually comes taxed: an impulsive exile that expires, a loot that trades quality for speed, a burst that costs you life. This one asks for the tax up front, as a discard rolled into the casting cost. The card math is honest about what that buys: discarding one to draw two is a net wash on raw count, so the payment is really for selection and for feeding the graveyard, not for advantage in the abstract. What tips the scale is the rider. Even with no Army on the battlefield, the amass line spins up a Zombie token before growing it, so the spell always leaves behind a body along with the fresh cards, and the counter it adds stays put after the token would otherwise sit as a fragile 0/0. That pairing (a hand refill and a small, permanent board investment in a single cast) is the design brief, and it points squarely at a mono-red or Rakdos deck already fielding Zombie Armies, where every counter compounds what is already there. The discard does quiet double duty besides: madness enablers, delve fuel, and escape payloads all want cards binned rather than played. The card is not a free red staple, though, because the amass return only scales for the archetype it was built to support. Outside a Zombie-Army shell it is a discard-taxed Divination with a token stapled on, which is serviceable but not where red wants to spend its cards.
