Pyric Salamander

Firebreathing usually buys a creature a future: pump, swing, and run the trick again next turn. Here the ability comes welded to a self-destruct clause. The moment you spend that R for power, you arm a delayed trigger that sacrifices the creature at the next end step. Leave the ability alone and the body sticks around as a plain two-drop; spend even a single red mana for a single point of pressure, and you have agreed to give it up. The mandatory sacrifice is not what keeps the cost low. Plenty of cheap creatures firebreath freely without any downside, from Dragon Hatchling on up, so the clause is doing something subtler than pricing. What it does is collapse the ability into one window. The trigger runs on its own clock rather than per activation, which means a defensive pump to win a single block costs you the creature exactly as much as pouring six mana into an alpha strike does. There is no incremental firebreathing, only one all-or-nothing turn. The salamander wants to be a burn-delivery vehicle wearing a body, spending its life in a single decisive swing, but most boards never present the turn where dumping all your red mana into a fragile 1/1 is correct. An early experiment in pinning a pump ability to a hard expiration date, and one whose commit-or-don't structure has kept it a design footnote rather than a card anyone built around.