Chandra's Outrage

Four mana for four damage to a creature is a deliberately soft rate, and the design pays for that softness with a built-in rider: two damage to the controller, every time. That clause is what the card is for. As pure removal it is overcosted on purpose, but stapling a fixed chunk of reach onto a kill spell turns it into a removal-and-clock hybrid that a dedicated burn deck can run toward the same goal it already cares about. The math is the pitch: cast it twice across a game and you have killed two blockers and shaved four off the opponent's life total without spending a card on the dome. It belongs to a long red tradition of removal that refuses to be only removal, the line that runs through Char and Flame-Tongue Kavu and the various Outrage-style spells that bundle face damage into creature kill. The instant-speed timing matters more than the rate suggests: holding it up means you can answer a freshly cast threat at end of turn and still bank the two points, rather than committing on your own main phase. It is not efficient and was never meant to be; the inefficiency is the cost of carrying two roles in one card, and for a deck that measures every spell by how much closer it gets to zero, that second number is worth the premium.