Ruthless Predation

The pump is the tell. Fight spells have always struggled with a symmetry problem: your creature deals its power to theirs, but theirs deals its power right back, so a straight fight is a trade the removal-caster half wants and half fears. The +1/+2 rider is green's fix for the return-fire tax. That extra toughness is doing the real work: it lets a creature survive fights it would otherwise lose, turning a two-way brawl into a one-sided kill while your creature walks away. The +1 power sweetens the odds of finishing a slightly larger target, but the toughness is what changes which fights are worth picking. Green has been iterating on this since Prey Upon gave the color a two-mana fight, then Pounce and Ram Through and others hunted for the right amount of insurance to bolt onto the effect. This one lands on modest but reliable numbers, sorcery-speed only, which keeps it honest as a proactive removal option rather than a combat trick. It asks you to have a creature already, and it asks that creature to be big enough that a two-point toughness bump tips the math. When both are true, it clears a blocker or a threat and leaves your board better than it found it; when they are not, it does nothing, which is the constraint green accepts in exchange for touching creatures it is otherwise not supposed to touch.