Megrim
The engine that gave discard a clock instead of a tempo profit. Stripping an opponent's hand has always been card advantage, but card advantage on its own does not win games; it just narrows the opponent's options. This enchantment reframes every discard as a Shock to the face, turning the symmetrical chore of hand disruption into a wincon. The crucial design choice is that it only punishes discards by opponents, which keeps your own loots, cycling, and rummaging clean and points the whole machine outward. That sets up a deck built backward from the trigger: you no longer run discard to deny resources, you run it to deal damage, and effects that force repeated discards (the wheel-style mass discard, the per-turn attrition pieces) stop being card-neutral hand attack and become burn that scales with the opponent's grip. It is the foundational piece of the discard-as-aggression archetype, the card every later "punisher" effect in black has been measured against, and the reason "make them discard their whole hand" reads as lethal math rather than a board-state inconvenience. The 2 damage per card is small in isolation; the archetype's job is to make that number fire over and over.

Rules text
Format Status
More formatsFewer formats
Other printings
- Salvat 2011#74
- Duels of the Planeswalkers#26
- Magic 2010#104
- Tenth Edition#157
- Eighth Edition#143★
- Eighth Edition#143
- Seventh Edition#146★
- Seventh Edition#146









