Huatli's Spurring

Strip the conditional and what remains is a +2/+0 trick for a single red, unremarkable rate by any era's standard; the +4/+0 mode reads as the real card, but it taxes the deckbuilder rather than the manabase, asking you to commit to a particular planeswalker before the combat trick earns its slot. That structure puts it in a recognizable lineage of "kicker by control" spells: cards that print a baseline anyone can cast and a premium effect gated behind a board state you build toward, the way certain spells reward a creature type or a permanent you already own. The whole balancing act runs through that gate. The baseline has to stay castable enough to justify the slot when the condition is closed, yet cheap enough that the upgraded mode does not become oppressive once it opens. At one mana, the spell threads that by being small at both ends: a real but modest swing on its own, a genuinely scary one when the condition is met. It is a tie-in trick, built to make a named planeswalker feel like the engine of an aggressive board rather than a sideline value piece, and it does that narrow job without pretending to do more.