Accursed Centaur

The cost is in the contract: enter the battlefield, lose a creature. The math only resolves when the body you give up is one you wanted dead anyway, which makes this less a beater than a delivery mechanism with a one-mana invoice. Feed it a token, a creature that already cashed its enters-the-battlefield trigger, or something already dying to a death-payoff, and the 2/2 arrives free. It belongs to a small black lineage that tried to make sacrifice feel cheap rather than punishing: the price is paid up front, automatically, so the deck has to be built to want it paid. Read in isolation, it underperforms any vanilla two-power one-drop, which is precisely the design's wager. The aristocrats archetype that eventually crystallized around death triggers and sacrifice outlets is exactly where a forced, free sacrifice stops being a drawback and becomes a step you sequence around. Without that scaffolding, you have spent a creature to put a worse creature on the battlefield, a bad trade dressed as an aggressive rate. The tension is honest about itself: the front is pushed because the back is a real cost, and the card never pretends the clause is anything but a debt due on resolution.