Kami's Flare

The interesting design decision here is where the reach lives. Three damage to a creature or planeswalker at two mana is a fair rate on its own, the kind of removal that would see fringe play with no rider at all. The rider is the whole reason the card exists: two damage to the controller, but only if you control a modified creature, meaning an Equipment-bearer, an Aura-target, or anything wearing a counter. That gate is what pays for the reach. In a deck built to satisfy it, the card stops being pure interaction and starts closing the gap on a life total while it answers a blocker or a walker, folding the burn-to-face plan into the removal slot rather than asking for a separate card. The condition also reveals what archetype it was cut for: the modified-matters shell, where +1/+1 counters, cheap Equipment, and Auras are already accumulating for other reasons, so the two-point kicker comes essentially free. Absent that context it reads as a slightly overcosted burn spell with a dead clause. That is the honest tension in the design, and it is deliberate: the card is a reward for committing to a plan, not a generically efficient removal spell you splash into anything.