Sparring Collar

First strike on a stick is unremarkable; the second line is where this Equipment earns its keep. Most Equipment forces a choice between deploying a creature and suiting it up, since equip is a sorcery-speed tax paid on your own turn. This one keeps the cheap sorcery-speed equip but bolts on a parallel attach ability that costs double red and carries no timing restriction. That means the collar can leap from one attacker to another at instant speed during combat: after you swing and the defender declares blockers, an attacker about to die in a trade or get chumped suddenly has first strike, kills its blocker, and lives. The cost is the discipline that keeps the trick from being free. The equip is among the cheapest written, so the collar rides along happily in slower decks, but the flash-attach demands two red sources untapped at the right moment, pricing the ambush out of any deck that can't reliably produce that color commitment mid-combat. The card splits its audience down the middle of its own text box: white and artifact decks take the budget equip and the static first strike; mono-red and red-heavy aggro decks take the instant-speed reattachment and treat it as a recurring combat trick no removal spell needs to be spent on. It is an early example of an Equipment using a colored alternate-attach cost to encode two different cards into one frame, and the redundancy is the point.