Orcish Oriflamme
The oriflamme was the medieval French battle standard, the banner that signaled no quarter, and the name does real work here: this is an early attempt to hand red a Glorious Anthem of its own, restricted to the attack step so the bonus only ever serves an aggressive plan and locks out of defensive use. The design belongs to the Alpha-era school where global static effects were priced as if their mere existence justified the cost, before the format learned that anthems compete with creatures for the same mana and usually lose. The rate is the problem, then and now: by the time you have untapped with a four-mana enchantment that adds a single point of power per attacker, the red decks that actually wanted the effect have already deployed enough threats that the marginal damage rarely closes a window the board was not already closing. Red, more than any color, wants its fourth turn to swing the board immediately, and a sorcery-speed anthem that does nothing on defense fails that test. It survives as a piece of red's deep history: a flag-bearer, literally, for an aggressive-anthem archetype that the color would not get a workable version of until lords that bundled the pump with haste or evasion onto a body, rather than asking a do-nothing enchantment to carry the plan alone.

Rules text
Format Status
More formatsFewer formats
Other printings
- 30th Anniversary Edition#162
- 30th Anniversary Edition#459
- The List#EMA-140
- Eternal Masters#140
- Seventh Edition#206★
- Seventh Edition#206
- Classic Sixth Edition#197
- Fifth Edition#257


















