Kamahl's Sledge

Threshold is the entire reason this spell exists, and the printed mode is the fallback rather than the feature. Pay the full freight with a thin graveyard and you have bought four damage to a creature at a rate no aggressive red deck would ever accept; that version is the insurance clause for the games where you have to act early. The build it wants spends its first turns stocking the yard, and once the count tips over, the same card fires four at the creature and four at its controller, turning a clumsy removal spell into reach that also strips a blocker on the way down. That two-stage payoff is the recurring lesson of early-era Threshold design: the cost is set against the empowered effect, and the empowered effect is the one you are meant to earn. Where most cards of this style offered a quiet upgrade once the count was met, this one swings the card's whole purpose from removal to face-damage closer, which is the more interesting place on the dial and the reason it endures mostly as a study in how aggressively that period priced its graveyard rewards.