Rally the Forces

Instant-speed team pumps live or die on the size of the swing they buy relative to their cost, and this one wins combat rather than ends the game. The +1/+0 is a rounding error on most boards; first strike across the whole attacking team is the real payload, and it's why this reads as a combat instant rather than a finisher. Granting first strike to every attacker reshapes the damage step itself: blockers that would trade now die before they connect, and the attackers come through unscathed. Double-blocks fall apart, would-be trades become clean kills, and creatures that should have died in the exchange walk away to swing again. Compared with the burn-the-board-down school of red instants, this is the convoy approach: it asks for a wide aggressive board already in motion and pays off an attack step you were going to make anyway. The narrow window is the cost. It does nothing on defense, nothing on an empty board, and nothing the turn you're not committing creatures to the red zone. Held up at instant speed, though, it turns a stalled ground war into a one-sided exchange, rewarding the player who keeps mana open and bluffs the trick rather than slamming it precombat. The value lives entirely in that combat-math reversal: not pushing extra damage past blockers, but making the blocks themselves lopsided.