Flametongue Yearling

Flametongue Kavu is the ancestor everyone reaches for, and the naming is no accident: this is the same effect broken into installments you pay on the way in. The original locked you into a 4/2 body and a fixed four damage; this one asks how much you want to spend, then scales the removal and the creature together off the same counters. Cast bare for two mana, it is a 2/1 that pings something for two. Each kick adds a +1/+1 counter and, because the damage keys off power, a full point of removal on top: one kick and it enters as a 3/2 dealing three, two kicks and it is a 4/3 dealing four, and the ceiling keeps climbing as long as you have the mana. The design lets it be a cheap tempo trade early and a top-end threat-plus-answer later, all from a single card. But the entry trigger is mandatory and demands a target creature, and that constraint is sharper than it looks: on an empty board it has no legal target but itself, and since its power always exceeds its toughness, it walks in and immediately kills itself. What multikicker buys, structurally, is a removal spell whose size you set at cast time rather than at printing time, leftover mana always feeding the body. What it demands in return is something worth pointing at, every time it enters.