Pillar of Flame

Two damage for one red mana has never been the headline; the exile clause is. Most early burn cared only about the number on the front of the card, leaving the back end open to whatever recursion a deck could muster: undying creatures that came back bigger, persist bodies that wanted to die, graveyard engines that treated removal as a setup step. This was burn built to answer that loop directly. The damage kills the creature, and the replacement effect strips it out of the game before any death-triggered comeback can fire, which is why it reads as a clean removal spell against decks built on dying. The cost of that precision is everything outside the window: against anything with more than two toughness, or against a player face, the exile rider does nothing and you are paying for a two-damage Shock. That narrowness is the design's whole point. It is a tuned answer rather than a generalist, a removal spell that says less about how much damage red is allowed to deal and more about closing the door that death triggers and graveyard recursion had pried open. The lineage it sits in (burn that exiles instead of merely killing) shows up wherever a format leans hard on creatures that want to be in the graveyard, and this is one of the tidiest expressions of that idea at a single red mana.