Fire Nation Attacks

Two 2/2 Soldiers for five mana reads a full generation behind, and that is the point: the rate is the cover charge for a ritual dressed as a token spell. Each body adds red the moment it is declared as an attacker, before blockers are even assigned, so the tokens begin refunding their own mana the instant they swing. That mana is what the card exists to generate, and it is also its leash: the payoff is chained to the combat step and vanishes when combat ends, so the red wants to be spent right there, on a trick, a burn spell, or the next creature down. Instant speed makes the sequencing trivial: flash the tokens in before your turn arrives and they can attack on your very next swing, so you are never sitting on a sorcery-speed board that must survive a full rotation before it earns its keep. The flashback clause at eight-and-a-red is the recursion tax, a second casting from the graveyard that returns both the bodies and the ritual for a late-game refuel. The design is running two jobs in parallel: it seeds an attack-triggered mana engine and it front-loads a body-plus-body play into a color that usually buys width through card economy rather than combat rhythm. The flashback exile caps the whole thing at two castings, which keeps a repeatable ritual from ever compounding into a loop.