Shivan Hellkite

Most red dragons of this era were rate on a stick: a 5/5 flier you cast to close the game over a few swings. The repeatable ping rewires that. The body becomes almost incidental once the activated ability comes online, because as long as red mana keeps flowing, per damage scales into whatever the late game leaves unspent. One activation mops up a one-toughness creature; a fistful of mana sweeps a small board or aims everything at the opponent's life total. The cost is the governor on the engine: at full price per point, no single shot is free, so the power comes from volume rather than efficiency, and the machine only runs when there is mana left over after the rest of your turn. Flying does quiet structural work alongside the ability, since a creature that can swing in the air and machine-gun the board in the same turn sets the terms of combat from a position that is hard to interact with profitably. The design pointed toward a later strain of red dragon defined by an attached burn engine rather than raw statistics, where the body is a delivery system for repeated damage and the real threat is everything it can do after it resolves.