Witchstalker Frenzy

The printed cost of is a fiction the card is designed never to pay, and the discount tracks exactly what the text says: every creature that attacked this turn shaves a generic mana off, and that clause counts your opponent's attackers as readily as your own. In the aggressive deck committing bodies to the red zone, this arrives as a one- or two-mana five-damage blast to clear a blocker on the same turn the attack presents the threat. But the same reduction fires from the defending seat: a control player facing a wide swing can hold this up and, once several attackers are declared, cast it for to answer the biggest one at the moment of maximum discount. It never reaches zero (the single red pip is always owed), so it is cheap, not free. That is the design conceit: a removal spell priced not by what it kills but by how much combat has already happened, which means it costs least precisely when the board is most crowded and the answer most wanted. The instant timing lets it wait for a declared blocker or a combat trick before it fires. The catch is that its full price applies on a turn without attackers; it needs a turn where creatures have swung, from either side, to become the bargain it wants to be. Five damage is the deliberate ceiling: enough to kill nearly anything a fair deck fields, calibrated as a fair effect that happens to arrive at an unfair rate.