Scorchmark

Two damage at instant speed prices out a lot of the board, but the rider is what earns the card its identity: any creature this finishes off gets exiled rather than dying, so the recursion economy that keeps small threats alive never collects its dividend. The clause is aimed squarely at bodies that only get more dangerous once they hit the graveyard: undying and persist creatures, reanimation targets, anything with a death trigger you would rather not pay off. Rather than bolting a separate hard-answer effect onto the spell, the exile is folded into the damage as a conditional replacement: kill it here, and it never touches the graveyard to be looped or brought back. The instant speed sharpens that further. It can hold up as a response, catching a small creature before its controller commits a pump spell to save it, or answering a would-be blocker before its owner banks the body for later value. Structurally it does the work a white exile-on-death effect does, but stapled to burn instead of to a combat trick or an enchantment, which is a recurring red compromise: trade raw efficiency for a targeted grudge against graveyard engines. The ceiling is modest and the floor is narrow; what it offers is a cheap, clean out to the creatures that laugh at ordinary damage.