Raphael, Tough Turtle

The pitch is incremental reach, and incremental reach only matters if your deck reliably keeps adding bodies turn over turn. Alliance fires on every creature after the first, one at a time, so it does not demand a token-cluster turn; it demands a board you keep refilling. RW Go-Wide is the home that does that without trying: a low curve plus equipment turns each ping into a second clock layered under combat damage. UR also has a claim, since the artifact and Sneak pieces give it bodies to deploy, but it values Raphael lower because its deployment comes one creature at a time off the top rather than in waves, which makes the ping a trickle instead of a tax.

For RW it lands P1P5 to P1P7: ahead of generic two-drops, behind any common removal and behind the genuinely aggressive bodies. The ceiling is what this format rewards. Sneak is the dominant mechanic by card count, and Sneak creatures arrive singly, so the trigger leans on honest deployment rather than an engine. Red has no token-maker at common to crank it.

Equipment is the lever that keeps the 1/3 honest. Bespoke Bō turns it into a body the opponent has to answer instead of a defensive wall propping up a dead ability, which protects the plan from a chump-attack stalemate. The punisher is Stomped by the Foot: every black deck runs it, it kills a 1/3 for two without effort, and a reach plan routed through one legendary body collapses when that body eats removal on curve.

Maindeck in RW Go-Wide, low priority in UR, last pick or sideboard otherwise. Take it once the go-wide deck has shown up, not on spec.

A two-mana incremental-damage payoff for red go-wide decks in Commander, the kind of trigger you add once the token engine and the real win conditions are already assembled. The design is tidy in the ways the card page lays out: the 1/3 keeps it off the board-wipe wishlist, and the opponent-facing damage routes around the anthem-versus-wrath tension that sinks traditional team buffs. The catch at a multiplayer table is the single target. Each creature pings one opponent, not all three, so the damage scales slower than the board does. Reasonable in a budget red tokens list; the first cut when Purphoros, God of the Forge or another all-opponents pinger comes in at a higher mana cost.

The 2-mana go-wide payoff slot, which in Modern means the Prowess and token shells around cards like Monastery Swiftspear and the various creature-flood lists that lean on Ragavan or Goblin engines. The incumbents for the "second-creature payoff" role are not other pingers but the anthem-and-haste effects, chiefly Reckless Bushwhacker, plus the burn-to-face plans that already do this job through spells rather than permanents. That is the structural problem. A red aggro deck that wants to convert creature drops into opponent damage already owns Lightning Bolt and Lava Spike for the burn half and Bushwhacker for the go-wide half, and neither asks the deck to first resolve a 1/3 that does nothing the turn it lands.

The 1/3 body is the right design discipline, as the identity blurb notes, but in Modern it reads as a tempo cost the format does not forgive. The deck has to be deploying multiple creatures per turn for the ping to outrun a Bolt to Raphael's face, and the decks fast enough to do that (Prowess, Goblins) would rather spend turn two on a threat that pressures life immediately. The trigger also leans on Alliance, so the first creature each turn is dead weight, which is exactly the wrong tax for a deck trying to flood the board on a clock.

Legal, but yet to register in tracked tournament play this season. The honest read is that this is a downgrade against the burn and Bushwhacker incumbents it would have to displace, and Modern has no slower go-wide shell waiting to use it.

A two-mana ping engine for go-wide red decks that want incidental reach without committing to an anthem. The format's faster red lists would rather deploy a body that attacks than a 1/3 that only matters once a second creature lands, which keeps Raphael off the lists trying to close on the earliest turns. When it does show up, it is a marginal inclusion in token-leaning builds with a spare slot, usually as a pair, where the repeatable opponent-facing damage adds up over a wide board.

The barest trickle of play this season, registered as a one-of in red go-wide builds, and that placement is more a tell about the format than about the card. Pioneer has Mono-Red Aggro and Boros Heroic, but neither is a true token-flood deck that fires a second, third, and fourth creature in a turn the way Alliance wants. Mono-Red runs out one threat at a time and prefers its early creatures to attack: a one-drop like Monastery Swiftspear does more work on an empty board than a 1/3 that asks the deck to keep deploying. Heroic wants targeted pump spells on a single hexproof body, the opposite of the wide commitment Raphael rewards.

The deck that would want this, a dedicated red token aggregator built to chain creature entries, does not exist in Pioneer's current map. There is no archetype where the second-creature-onward ping accumulates fast enough to outrace the format's interaction. Where it has appeared, it competes with more immediate two-drops for the slot and loses that comparison in any list that wants to attack rather than grind incremental reach.

This is a card waiting on a shell Pioneer has not assembled. Until a wide red deck shows up with the mana density to make the trigger fire two or three times a turn, the right read is a fringe inclusion in builds testing the effect, not a fixture in any established list.

The pitch is appealing on paper: a 2-mana red two-drop that turns every subsequent creature into reach. Goblins is the obvious test bed, since that deck already floods the board faster than anything else in the format and ends games on Goblin Bushwhacker reach. The problem is that the Goblins kill is already a burst of damage out of nowhere, and Raphael wants the long game where you keep deploying bodies turn after turn. The 1/3 line that the design uses to price the trigger also means he does nothing to close on his own, which is awkward in a deck that would rather run Mogg War Marshal or a second Bushwhacker effect in the same slot.

There is a sharper home in Boros Synthesis, which is the red-white go-wide deck built on token generators and Glint Hook style incremental damage, but that shell already leans on its anthem and burst pieces and does not obviously want a defensive body that asks the game to go longer than the format's clock usually allows.

He shows up here and there this season, registered in small numbers when he appears, but never as the deck's plan. Closer to a fringe experiment than a contested slot. Under a tix on MTGO. The format already has its go-wide payoffs sorted, and this turtle does not displace them.

Drip damage is the wrong axis in a format defined by Black Lotus into Ancestral Recall on turn one. Raphael wants a go-wide creature deck Vintage does not run, and it taxes the life total one point per additional creature that enters, which is exactly the clock no Vintage deck needs when storm and combo kills close games before a 1/3 pings anyone down. At two mana it dodges Mental Misstep but does nothing the format hasn't already lapped several times over by the time it resolves. Legal, but yet to register in tracked tournament play. Noise.

A 2-mana 1/3 that pings an opponent each time a second creature enters. The body asks the deck to go wide and stay wide, which is fine, but Legacy's go-wide payoffs already operate at a different speed: Goblins runs Goblin Warchief and Muxus, and an aristocrats-style red drain has access to faster engines. Raphael needs you to commit multiple creatures into a format with Lightning Bolt and Swords to Plowshares at one mana, and the 1/3 dies to neither's natural prey but does nothing the turn it lands. At two mana it pays Daze on the way in for a clock that depends on surviving the next several turns. Legal, but yet to register in tracked tournament play. Does not clear the bar.