Lunar Frenzy

Two riders do the heavy lifting here, and bundling both is what turns a plain scaling pump into a closer. Trample means the extra points you paid for don't vanish into a chump block; first strike means a lone blocker dies before it can land its return blow. Together they convert a variable +X/+0 into damage the defender can't profitably answer with a single body: pour enough into X on an unblocked or lightly-blocked attacker and the combat step stops being a trade and starts subtracting from a life total directly. Scaling the effect off X sets the ceiling and the floor at once: a trick tied to your mana pool sits inert until the board and the pool both line up, trading the reliability of a fixed-cost pump for a much higher top end. What instant timing buys is the ambush, and it stays an ambush: held through an opponent's attack step, it turns a favorable-looking block into a dead creature and a whiffed attacker; drawn late into a stalled board, it collapses the standoff mid-combat when you finally point it at an attacker with enough mana behind it. Red has mined this vein for reach since Berserk and Brute Force: a cheap floor, a payload that scales with whatever is already swinging, and the discipline to hold it for the turn the surplus power actually finishes the job. Loading a combat-damage rider and an evasion rider onto one card pushes it firmly toward that closing role rather than an early tempo swing.