Skyhunter Strike Force

Melee is a keyword built for the multiplayer table, and this design leans all the way into it: the pump scales to how many opponents you attacked in a single combat, so a duel leaves the 2/2 flier with a lone +1/+1 to show for its swing. The engine sits in the Lieutenant clause, which loans melee to your whole board while your commander stands. Suddenly a personal, one-creature boost becomes team-wide escalation: send everyone into three opponents and each attacker collects the same growing bonus at once. White usually rewards going wide with static anthems, permanent and unconditional; this offers something transient, combat-only, and paid for with aggression, swelling with every player you are willing to hit. The greediest attack (all creatures, all opponents) is also the most exposed, so a sweeper or a wall of blockers punishes exactly the all-in commitment the melee bonus dangles in front of you. And because the anthem depends on your commander surviving, the whole thing is brittle by design. That brittleness has a precise cutoff, and it is worth internalizing. Kill or bounce the commander before attackers are declared and your other creatures never have melee, so the triggers never fire at all. Once attackers are declared, the melee triggers exist independently of the commander, and removing it afterward no longer unwinds a bonus that has begun to apply. The window to disrupt the whole board's escalation is the beginning of combat, not a moment later.