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Raid Bombardment and the Fine Art of Card Advantage

There’s something gleefully ruthless about playing red that isn’t just about to-the-face damage. It’s the quick, twitchy math of trading tempo for card advantage, and Raid Bombardment serves as a master class in that philosophy 🧙‍♂️🔥. This humble Ultimate Masters enchantment costs {2}{R} and enters as a common, whispering the promise of incremental value as you press your board. Its trigger—“Whenever a creature you control with power 2 or less attacks, this enchantment deals 1 damage to the player or planeswalker that creature is attacking”—turns every attack into an opportunity to draw gas from the battlefield’s furnace ⚔️. The more little creatures you commit to combat, the more you squeeze from each raid, and that is the heart of true card advantage in red: converting bodies into information and pressure with every swing 💎.

In practice, Raid Bombardment rewards a specific and satisfying play pattern: swarm the board with resilient, affordable attackers and let your opponent choose how long the pain lasts. Small creatures—2/2s, 1/1s, or efficient little beaters—turn your attack phase into a pinpointed ping that racks up damage on the opponent and fuels your hand with additional threats, removal, or could-be-late-game blowouts. The enchantment doesn’t just chip away life totals; it compounds your resource pool, nudging you toward favorable trades, better block reads, and, crucially, more cards in hand over the course of a game 🧙‍♂️. It’s the kind of card advantage that sneaks up on you: a single attack you might have made anyway becomes a disciplined pressure system with a built-in reward for aggressiveness 🔥.

Strategic frameworks for maximizing value

• Small-critter density matters. The key to Raid Bombardment’s power is the frequency of your tiny attackers. Build a board where most threats are low-cost, low-power creatures—think 1/1s and 2/2s—that you’re happy to sacrifice to pressure your opponent’s life total and draw-coins from the enchantment’s trigger. Each successful attack becomes a ladder rung toward more cards, more threats, and more inevitability 🎲.
• Tempo with purpose. Red’s identity often centers on tempo—leveraging speed and efficiency to outpace opponents. Raid Bombardment helps you keep that tempo by converting every swing into both damage and card advantage, all while your opponent contends with a flood of smaller attackers. The timing is everything: aim to trigger damage during your offensive turns, then refill your hand for the next wave of assaults 🔥.
• Power thresholds and board states. Since the trigger cares about power 2 or less, you’re incentivized to couple Raid Bombardment with creatures that aren’t overcommitting to the board. This can keep you safely underneath the radar of big blockers and pave the way for more targeted tempo plays—think cards that buff small creatures or protect them just long enough to cross the threshold into more damage and more draw 💎.
• Planeswalkers and players as targets. The emblematic risk of this effect is misalignment: you want the damage to land on the opponent, not you. Liquefy your opponent’s resources with precise swarms and then lean on your remaining gas to finish the job. If the board stalls, you’ll still have a steady trickle of damage while you reload your hand with threats and removal—an astonishingly efficient cycle ⚔️.

Deck-building ideas and synergy notes

Raid Bombardment shines in red decks that lean into resilience and swarm tactics. Think of it as a cornerstone for archetypes that tolerate early chomps from your opponent while you accumulate momentum. In commander (EDH), the enchantment can anchor strategies around affinity for resource generation and incremental inevitability, where the board presence matters more than raw punch. In modern or legacy formats, the card’s value grows in red-based tempo or aggro-slanted shells that want to push through small but relentless pressure while turning your creatures into a growing ledger of damage and draw 📈.

Flavor-rich and mechanically clean, Raid Bombardment also invites playful combos. Pair it with creatures that gain benefits or buffs when they attack—pump spells, equipment, or anthem effects—to multiply not just damage, but the draw and threats you can cast on the following turns. And yes, goblin-style chaos has its own charm here: goblin warbands love to push forward, hoping the excite-and-dash rhythm of a Raid Bombardment board state will translate into a runaway victory before the opponent can mount a plan B 🎨.

Lore, art, and the design sensibility

The flavor text—“Goblins in the first wave of a fire raid always bemoan the aim of everyone else”—sets the tone for a card that’s all about mischief and momentum. Matt Cavotta’s illustration captures that roguish spark: the sense that a handful of tiny attackers, when coordinated, can deliver an outsized effect. It’s a reminder that in Magic, sometimes the loudest wins aren’t the most obvious, but the ones built on careful timing and a touch of reckless courage 🧙‍♂️.

From a design perspective, Raid Bombardment embodies a classic red play pattern: low-cost, high-leverage, repetition-driven value. The card’s rarity as a common in Ultimate Masters makes it an accessible pick for budget builds that still want to demonstrate a robust tempo and card-draw loop. The reprint logic also emphasizes how fundamental this effect can be when you pair it with the right creature suite and combat timing. It’s a delightful reminder that not all value comes from big haymakers; some of the best cards in MTG are the ones that keep delivering little pays every turn 💎.

As you brew, consider Raid Bombardment not as a singleton gadget but as a framework for a whole strategy—the kind of card that rewards thoughtful pressure, careful sequencing, and a healthy dose of red-hot luck 🔥.

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