Burning-Fist Minotaur

A 2/1 first striker for two mana is already a clean aggressive body, but the discard outlet is where the design earns its keep. Pumping +2/+0 turns first strike into a genuine combat threat: a 4/1 first striker kills most things it blocks and trades up against bigger creatures it cannot. The pump rewards flooding hands by converting dead draws into ammunition, treating a glutted grip as a resource rather than a liability. The cost structure is the discipline holding it in check, and it bites on two axes at once. Each activation demands on top of the discarded card, so chaining pumps in a single turn asks for a real mana investment, not just a fat hand; and every boost leaves the body at one toughness, so firing into open removal or chump-blocking a larger creature is so much wasted mana and a pitched card. The math punishes the player who overcommits. Note the inverse constraint too: an empty hand switches the ability off entirely, so this is a beater that wants cards to feed it, not one that scales as the game grinds out. The discard requirement also gives it a quiet secondary use as a graveyard-filling outlet for decks that want cards there, though the card is plainly built first as a creature that converts surplus draws into early pressure.