Heartfire

Aristocrat decks have always wanted a way to cash in a dying body for reach, and this is the cleanest conversion of the type: a sacrifice that turns any expendable creature or planeswalker into four damage at instant speed. The additional cost is the whole balancing act. It reads as a two-mana burn spell, but the real price is a permanent you already control, so the card only earns its rate in a deck built to have fodder on the board (token generators, a persistent recursion loop, a walker that has already earned its keep). Where it pulls ahead of a plain removal spell is in where the four damage can land: to the face it closes games, to a planeswalker or a fat blocker it clears a problem, and the sacrifice can be timed to dodge an exile effect or to trigger a death payoff on the way out. That flexibility comes at the structural cost of trading two cards (the fodder plus this) for a single removal or burn effect, so it lives in decks where the creature being sacrificed was going to die anyway, or where its death is upside rather than loss. In a fair deck it is a bad trade; in a sacrifice engine it is a finisher wearing the clothes of a burn spell.