Elektra, Femme Fatale

The self-inflicted wound is the price tag, and the routing is the whole trick. Rather than a flat "deal 4 to a creature," the ability makes you volunteer two damage to your own face first, gating a strong removal effect behind a cost paid in a resource red spends freely. Burn shells and any deck comfortable treating its own life total as ammunition read the tax as a discount, not a drawback. Four damage to a creature clears most of what a red deck wants dead, and it arrives stapled to a 3/2 attacker rather than spent as a naked spell. Crucially, this fires on an enters trigger, not a cast trigger, so the removal reloads every time she touches the battlefield: blink, flicker, and reanimation all reset it, turning a fragile body into a repeatable four-damage engine for any deck built to send her in and out. The two-life tax scales with the abuse, though. A flicker loop that kills three creatures also drains six of your own life, so the same clause that makes the effect repeatable is what caps how greedy the loop can get. Left alone as a plain 3/2, she trades down in combat, which keeps the removal-on-a-stick honest for decks that only ever get one entry out of her. The self-damage is optional, too, so against an empty board she simply comes down clean, no life spent chasing a target that isn't there.