Runechanter's Pike
In a deck built on cantrips, burn, and counters, the graveyard fills itself, and every spell that resolves becomes a permanent point of power waiting for a body to carry it. That is the whole engine: the buff scales with a resource a spell-heavy deck is producing anyway, turning the bin from a dumping ground into a damage counter. The first strike is what makes the math lethal rather than cosmetic. A small creature swinging for a graveyard's worth of damage that connects before blockers strike back is a one-card finisher dressed up as Equipment, capable of ending a game in a single combat step. The constraint is the body itself. The Pike does nothing without a creature to hold it, and the creatures a spell-heavy deck wants to run are usually fragile, so both the two-mana equip and the attack step are windows where the plan can be answered. It also leans harder on the graveyard than most aggressive plans do, which makes it uniquely exposed to a single exile effect that erases the count at instant speed. The idea of converting a full graveyard into raw combat power recurs across the game's history; pairing that count with first strike on a cheap, re-equippable Equipment is what made this one a clean repeatable threat. Re-equipping is the recovery line too: once the Pike is on the battlefield it stays there, so after the holder dies, another body can pick it up and resume the assault.



