Goretusk Firebeast

Six mana for a 2/2 that throws four damage at a player's face: this is what burn looked like before red learned to be efficient. The damage skips creatures entirely, hitting only a player or planeswalker, so the body offers nothing on defense and the spell does nothing to clear a board. It is a finisher stapled to a chump blocker, the kind of beast-shaped reach an earlier era of red handed out as top-end closing power for decks short on it. The math tells the whole story of how cautiously red was priced back then: four life off the top was meant to feel like a reward for surviving to six mana, when later designs would compress that same burst into spells costing a fraction as much and demand no creature attached at all. The one angle that redeems the rate is the enters-the-battlefield trigger itself: any effect that blinks it or returns it to play fires the four damage again, so the 2/2 becomes the delivery mechanism rather than the point. That is the only context in which the steep cost stops mattering, because the body is no longer what you paid for; the trigger is. On its own, it remains a snapshot of how timidly red reach was costed before the format conversation moved on.