Smoldering Efreet

A 2/2 for two with a downside that runs entirely on your own clock: when it dies, the two damage goes to you, not your opponent. This is the aggressive-red bargain inverted. The body is a baseline beater, exactly the rate red wants on the cheap, but the card attaches a small bill to its own mortality. Every removal spell, every chump-block trade, every sacrifice becomes two life paid out of your own total. The drawback is deferred, which is the design's one piece of mercy: nothing happens while the creature lives, so the cost only lands at the moment you were already losing the body. That makes it a creature you would rather see die on your terms (a swung-in race, a burned-out opponent) than on theirs, since a removal-spell death hands the tempo loss and the life loss to the same play. It belongs to the long red tradition of creatures that damage their own controller as the price of being printed, but where most of those charge up front or tick a cost over time, this one charges at the very end. The bet is structural: a deck built around it expects to have closed the game before the body ever falls, treating its two life as a debt that comes due only if the plan has already failed.