Zenith Flare

The payoff that gave cycling an aggressive endgame instead of a smoothing tool. Cycling had always been priced as a defensive mechanic: pay a little to swap a stranded card for a live one, keep your draws flowing, never fall behind on cards. This turns those same discard actions into ammunition. Every card cycled to dig or fix earlier in the game is quietly loading the graveyard, and the reward is a two-color burn-and-drain that scales with how disciplined the early turns were. The design tension lives between the two clauses: the damage half wants a durdling deck full of cyclers, but the life half means the same card is a defense against the aggressive decks that punish durdling. At instant speed it reaches the face for lethal on an open turn, or bolts a single threat while padding the life total against everything else on the board, a lot of flexibility hung on a graveyard count you build across an entire game. The graveyard is not a bonus but the whole engine: with no cyclers in the yard the card is a blank, so the payoff demands the deck it wants rather than a splash. As a piece of retrofitting, it turns a value keyword into a wincon without changing what that keyword does on any individual card.