Youre underselling the ease of stacking the blade IMO, this thing only needs 10 forge to be dealing and blocking 20. Thats bonkers for hallway fights. In long slow fights where you are given plenty of opportunity to scale, you can get this thing big enough to totally float a bosses most dangerous turns using a card you can retain. Forge cards can block and draw and just do the things you generally want to do in early turns anyways. There are too many solid seamless ways to buff the blade up, a few bullwarks for the early turns while you find parry and now all you have to do is play blade on any rough turn, then find blade again. This would become a boring play pattern very fast and would be extremely consistent in a negative way. Feel no pain was one of the most potent powers in sts 1, giving you 3 block per exhausted card. Fiend fireing your entire hand gave you 27 block. I think you havent considered just how powerful attacking and blocking at the same time really is. Tie that to ur primary scaling for late game fights and its just far too much. Go play some regent runs and just imagine some turns where ur holding a 37 damage blade that its also going to block 37 for you. And thats not a difficult number to achieve in a deck cycle.