Acolyte of the Inferno

A blocker tax built into the body, not the keyword. Renown gets the marquee text, but the line doing the real work is the punishment for being blocked: any creature that steps in front of this takes 2 damage on contact, which clears most early defensive bodies it would otherwise stall behind. That turns a 3/1 (a stat line that trades poorly into combat and dies to almost anything) into something a small chump-blocker cannot profitably stop. The design tension is the friction the card lives inside: it needs to connect for renown to fire and grow into a 4/2, but its toughness invites blocks, and the block-damage clause is what lets it bully through the smallest defenders to get there. The timing wrinkle is sharper than it looks: the 2 damage triggers when the creature becomes blocked, before combat damage, so a 1-toughness blocker can die outright. But this card has no trample, and a creature that has been blocked stays blocked even after its blocker is gone. Killing the chump removes the body, not the block; the attack deals no combat damage to the player, and renown does not fire that turn. Larger blockers eat 2 and live, which is where the ceiling shows: it punishes the cheap, weenie-sized defense an aggressive curve is meant to outrace, and asks honest combat math of anything bigger. A pressure piece for a board kept tilted forward, less to win fights than to make the opponent reluctant to start them.