Burning Cloak
Read the two lines together and they appear to cancel: a creature gets bigger, then takes the exact damage that buff was worth. The trick is that the buff and the burn answer two different questions. Aimed at your own attacker, the +2/+0 is two extra points heading at the opponent's life total, and the 2 self-damage is free if the body was never going to block or trade anyway: a one-mana pump routed through your board as reach. Aimed at the opponent's small creature, the buff is dead weight and the 2 damage is the entire spell, killing anything with 2 or less toughness for a single red mana. The sorcery timing keeps both modes honest. You commit before attackers are declared, with no combat math to bluff around and no block to spring, so the card never reaches in as a surprise the way an instant-speed burn spell would. Portal targeted players learning the game against one another, and its cards favored text that read cleanly even when the smart line ran against intuition. This is a tidy specimen: the face promises "boost and burn," but the actual decision is colder than that, a question of whose creature you point it at and what you want the same two lines to do.
