Labyrinth Champion

The clearest illustration of why heroic, as a keyword, was always going to be a deckbuilding tax rather than a free upgrade. The trigger fires only when you cast a spell that targets this creature, so the body sits inert until you spend a second card to point at it: a pump spell, a protective trick, anything with the word "target." Pay that cost and you get a repeatable two-damage shock stapled to a Warrior, which is genuinely strong, but the math only works if your deck is built to feed the engine turn after turn. That is the real design tension here. A 2/2 for four mana is below rate on its own; the heroic line is a bet that you will reliably have a targeting spell in hand, and the payoff (any target, every time) is generous enough to reward the bet without being so cheap it warps a fair board. Red rarely gets repeatable burn attached to a creature precisely because it sidesteps the color's usual limits on reach, and heroic's "you must invest first" clause is the leash that keeps it in check. The class as a whole leaned on cheap, spell-dense shells to function; this one is the burn-anything finisher those shells were built to enable, the reward at the top of a curve of one-mana tricks rather than a standalone threat you splash for the stats.