Hotheaded Giant

Spend the four mana cold, on a turn where nothing red has happened yet, and the two -1/-1 counters knock the body down to a haste creature too small to justify the cost. Those counters are permanent, not a shrink that fades, so there is no waiting them out: the creature you get is the creature you keep. The condition is the whole wager. Cast a cheap red spell first, then this in the same turn, and the counters never appear; you are paying four mana for a hasty 4/4 plus whatever the first spell already did. That sequencing (a one-mana red spell, then a creature, in a single turn) is exactly what aggressive red decks chain together by reflex, which is the point. This is a payoff dressed as a beater, asking you to demonstrate you are running the kind of deck it wants to live in before it hands over the full statline. The friction lives entirely in deckbuilding and ordering rather than in the rate itself: a deck that can reliably empty a red spell first treats this as an honest four-drop, while one that cannot has stapled a downgrade to a creature it had no business playing. It is a design that grades how red your red deck actually is, and pays out only to the build that passes.