Take for a Ride

Threaten effects have always been sorceries for a reason: gaining a creature, swinging with it, and sacrificing it before the owner reclaims it is a tempo swing that would be miserable to eat with mana up. This one hands you the instant-speed version, but only once you've earned the timing. The flash clause is gated behind committing a crime, so the flexibility unlocks only after you've already interacted with an opponent: pointed a burn spell at their face, targeted something they control, or dug at their graveyard. Clear that bar and the card changes character, from a telegraphed Act of Treason variant into an ambush blocker, a combat-math trap, or a mid-combat theft that untaps a would-be blocker and takes it off defense. Miss the crime requirement and you're holding a plain sorcery-speed borrow. The gating is the clever part: a red deck built to attack and burn is already crossing that threshold most turns without trying, so the crime clause rarely costs anything a red pilot wasn't going to pay anyway. The control still reverts at cleanup, so this is a within-the-turn tool, not a permanent steal; the value lives in choosing the turn to spend it, not in keeping the creature. What's genuinely new is the timing axis: a threaten you can hold up as a reactive play, provided you've spent the turn being a menace first.