Rapid Fire

A combat trick that announces itself. The pre-blockers timing restriction is the structural key: because the spell must be cast before blockers are declared, it resolves fully and leaves the stack empty before the defender ever commits a single creature. The trick is already done; the keywords are already granted. So the defender resolves their blocking decision with full information, and a smart opponent simply declines to gang-block, sending in one creature or holding back and absorbing the hit. That is the honest tension in the design. This is not an ambush; it is a published threat that changes the defender's math while they still hold the choice. The first strike and the rampage 2 both apply before combat damage, so a gang of two or more blockers gets shredded at +2/+2 with first strike for every creature past the first, while a single blocker grants no bonus. The grant clause only fires on a creature that lacks rampage already, which makes this a self-contained trick rather than a keyword-stacking enabler: it hands the keyword out and then punishes the over-block. The card encodes a particular reading of how rampage was supposed to function, treating gang-blocking as a tempo gamble the attacker could deliberately bait. A historical curio now, but a clean record of design that treated the defender's blocking choice as a resource an attacker could pressure rather than spring a surprise on.