Sewer Rats

Black gets the firebreathing knob, color-shifted from the red template on bodies like Shivan Dragon, and the price tells you everything about how early designers thought the two colors should differ. Red buys power with mana alone; here each pump costs a mana plus a point of life, and the activation cap stops at three per turn, so the ceiling is a 4/1 bought for three mana and three life. That is a genuine swing for a 1/1 that folds to any decent blocker, but the life tax makes the arithmetic brutal in a race: every point you spend pushing damage is a point your opponent's clock no longer has to chase. The per-turn limit is doing quiet load-bearing work. Without it, an unbounded life-for-power knob turns a chump into a one-shot finisher the moment you have the mana, and Mirage-era Magic was still mapping out where black's life payments could safely scale. The rate is forgettable; the structure is the point. This is an attempt at pricing a self-pumping body in a color that buys power with something other than mana, fencing off the abuse with a hard cap before it could matter. A small joke (a rat that breathes fire) carrying a small lesson about how color identity gets enforced not through the effect itself but through what each color is asked to pay for it.