Messenger's Speed

Granting trample and haste for a single red mana is the kind of rate that should read as aggressive, and on paper it does: an aura that drops onto a fresh threat and turns it into an immediate, unblockable-around-chump-blockers attacker. The trouble is the chassis. Auras carry the structural cost they have carried since the earliest days of the game: the two-for-one risk, where a removal spell answers both the creature and the enchantment in one card, and the do-nothing-if-it-resolves-into-nothing problem of needing a body already on board before this matters. Trample and haste are exactly the two keywords that aggressive red wants stapled to a creature, but the better way to get them has almost always been to print them on the creature itself, or to hand them out through equipment that survives the creature's death. What this represents, then, is the persistent gap between a clean effect and a clumsy delivery system: the keywords are right, the price is right, and the format-defining version of this idea is the one that does not evaporate when the enchanted creature dies. As a cheap finisher-enabler for a red beatdown deck that needs to push the last points through, it does the job; as a piece you build around, the aura tax makes it a hard sell.