Antagonize

Red buys its power spikes big and blunt: where green grows a body a point per turn and keeps it standing, red's pump has always leaned toward the sudden top-end jolt that makes a small creature suddenly lethal, and this is that lineage at its plainest. Seven raw points of stats handed over at once is a lot of number, and the price Wizards charged for it is that none of it carries: no trample, no first strike, no evasion to push the extra power past a bigger blocker. That fixes the card's job as a race-winner and a combat-blowout trick, not a battering ram for a stalled board. Holding it with open mana is the whole argument for the slot over a comparable vanilla creature: kept back, it ambushes an attacker who walked into the trap, or converts a defended block into a kill that keeps your creature and eats theirs. What it will never do is grind a ground creature through a wall; the extra power just sits inert against a blocker large enough to survive the swing. That ceiling, not the mana, is the real measure of the card. It wins the fights the board already permits and does nothing to change which fights are on offer.