Fire Imp

A creature stapled to a Shock, with all the friction sanded off the presentation. Portal's design language pushed every effect onto the moment a card enters, framing removal as something a body simply does rather than something you cast and target separately. There is no decision past picking which creature to point at; the damage is bundled into a single legible event, the kind a player learning the game can resolve without ever reaching for a rules reference. (Under modern Oracle templating the trigger does go on the stack and an opponent can respond to it, so the inevitability is a teaching fiction rather than a rules guarantee, but the intended feel is the same: play the imp, two damage arrives, a 2/1 stays behind.) Trading a card for two damage and a small body is a fair rate dressed up as a tempo swing, the two-for-one that feels powerful to someone first counting card advantage. The enters-the-battlefield removal creature is a workhorse template now, refined across decades into bodies that can hit players, scale with the board, or choose their mode. Here it sits in its plainest form, one fixed target among creatures and nothing else to decide. The flatness is the assignment: the effect is telegraphed, the outcome inevitable to read, and the card does exactly one thing because that was the whole point.