Final Flare

Five damage for two-and-a-red is a rate that only exists inside a deck already spending its board. The sacrifice clause is not a downside grafted onto burn; it is the entire premise. This is removal built for the aristocrats shell, where creatures and enchantments are inventory rather than assets: tokens, expendable bodies, a spent aura, anything that has already done its job. Feed one to the spell and you get a kill number high enough to answer the fatties that ordinarily laugh off red's instant-speed damage. The design tension is the one every sacrifice-cost card negotiates. Priced this cheaply, it needs a real cost, and the cost is deck-specific enough that the card is inert in any pile that treats its permanents as things to keep. Where it belongs, the sacrifice is often net-positive, chaining into a death trigger you wanted to fire anyway. That folding of two effects into one card, the removal spell that is also a sacrifice outlet's fuel, is the through-line for how red interacts with the black sacrifice archetypes it partners with. The five-damage ceiling matters because it is one point clear of the four-toughness bracket that a lot of midrange threats sit in, so the spell answers a class of creature that cheaper red burn simply cannot reach.