Turn Inside Out

Most combat tricks pay for their power with fragility: you spend a card and mana to swing the math, and if the pump doesn't kill or your creature trades away, you've broken even at best. This one flips the ledger. The +3/+0 is the bait, priced cheaply enough to throw at anything, and the payoff triggers on the very outcome that usually reads as a loss. When the buffed creature dies (blocked, chumped, or shoved into a bad trade), you manifest dread: you sift the top two cards, keep one as a hidden threat and bury the other. So the death produces both a replacement body and a card in the yard, and reframes the exchange around initiating combat you'd otherwise decline. You pump into a block you know will kill your attacker, and the death becomes the point rather than the cost. The card wants small, expendable creatures whose demise you were happy to arrange anyway, and it sits comfortably in a graveyard-matters or sacrifice-adjacent shell where each fallen body was already earmarked to die. What keeps the raw stat boost from being a strict upgrade over a cleaner pump is that the trigger fires only on death: the creature that survives its raise gets nothing, so the reward is gated behind the loss. It is a pump spell built for players who want their creatures to die usefully, laundering combat casualties into board presence.