Shock Troops

A 2/2 that pays for its own death with two points of damage was a poor exchange even in the era it was printed, and the design makes no attempt to disguise the cost. Structurally it is a creature doubling as deferred burn: it holds the ground as a body until you need the damage, then converts itself into the equivalent of a slow Shock at the price of dying. The sacrifice ability does the interesting work, because it dodges the sorcery-speed limit you might expect, letting the two damage be held up at instant speed to finish a creature in combat, snipe a planeswalker, or push the last points through. Everything around that flexibility is priced badly: the body is fragile, the activation is one-shot, and the math (four mana invested, two damage out, the creature gone) sat well below what dedicated removal already offered. It belongs to the broad family of bodies-that-become-burn that recurs in red, where the creature is the deferral and its death is the payoff. Most members of that family eventually got cheaper or hit harder; this one is the early, expensive draft of an idea red would refine for years afterward.