Defiant Khenra

A vanilla 2/2 for two mana with no text at all, and the absence is the design. Fast red decks run on a floor of unconditional bodies that ask nothing of the manabase and arrive before the opponent has stabilized, and a plain 2/2 at this rate fills that requirement without spending a keyword slot that could go to a splashier two-drop. There is nothing here to misread or sequence around: it shows up on time, applies two damage worth of pressure, and trades evenly into most of what gets deployed early. The Jackal Warrior typing is the only seam worth noting, giving it a home in Warrior-matters and tribal builds that want a clean body over a unique effect. This does the unglamorous arithmetic that lets the flashier aggressive creatures function, since a curve needs cheap fodder to keep the clock ticking while the payoffs come online. It wants to be run in multiples and never in ones, because its whole contribution is tempo rather than any individual line of play.