Searing Blood

The conditional reach across the board is the whole design problem here. Two damage to a creature is below the going rate for double-red removal; the three to the controller is what pays for the color intensity, and it is gated behind a clause the caster only partly controls. The trigger needs the creature to die this turn, which means the toughness math has to line up: cast it on a two-toughness body and the reward is automatic, point it at anything bigger and you are either holding a second piece of removal or eating the downside. That gating is the honest cost of an aggressive removal-plus-burn package on one card, and it tells you exactly which decks the effect was built to serve: ones already attacking the opponent's life total, where killing a blocker and shaving three off the dome are the same line of play. The lineage is the long red project of stapling reach onto cheap removal without printing another Lightning Bolt: Searing Blaze does the same trick keyed to an attacking creature and a land you control, Skewer the Critics asks for spectacle, Searing Spear just charges more. This one's tax is the death requirement, which makes it sharpest against the small creatures aggressive decks most want gone and dead weight against the fatties they least want to trade with. The design rewards reading the board rather than the card.