Heartfire Immolator

The tension every aggressive two-drop wrestles with is what happens after the board stalls: a 2/2 that traded early is just chip damage the rest of the game. This one refuses to become a dead card by converting itself into removal on the way out, and the sacrifice cost being a single red mana means the conversion is nearly free. The sequencing that matters is subtle: sacrifice is part of the activation cost, so the creature is already gone by the time the ability hits the stack, and the damage is locked to its power at the moment it left. That means the pump has to happen first. Spend the turn casting cheap noncreature spells to inflate the body with prowess, then cash the fattened 2/2 into a kill it could not have afforded at rest. Casting a burn spell in response after activation does nothing for the damage; the number is already fixed. The card wants to be the last thing you do, not the first, and the payoff scales with how much cheap interaction you have already stacked before it commits to the trade. That double role (a spells-fueled beater while the coast is clear, a mana-cheap removal drone when the ground clogs up) is what keeps a prowess deck from running out of gas. The prowess tax is the same tax every spell-matters creature pays; the difference is that the payoff here is a permanent removed from the board, not three points that fizzled into the red zone.