Cunning Strike

The interest is in how the four damage divides. Two to a creature and two to a player or planeswalker means you are never picking one target over the other; you commit to both, and the replacement draw stops the exchange from costing you a card. That is the design tension at its heart: the effect wants to be removal, reach, and a cantrip all at once, and stapling three jobs together at instant speed means none of them arrives cheap. Two damage rarely kills the creature you actually need dead, so the removal half tends to trade down. Where it earns its cost is the planeswalker line: two to a body plus two to a loyalty counter pressures two threats with a single card, and the draw means you spent mana without spending card economy to do it. It belongs to the long Izzet lineage of "a little of everything" instants, the ones that read better in a vacuum than they play on a real curve, where the rate matters more than the breadth. The whole design values flexibility over efficiency and charges accordingly for the privilege of doing several small things inside one instant-speed window.