Soul Immolation

The tension here is that the payoff is welded to a self-mutilation, and the mechanic keeps those two things at arm's length. Blight X puts the counters somewhere on your board, but the ceiling for X is set by the greatest toughness anywhere among your creatures. So the durable creature is the meter, and a separate, more disposable body can be the one that actually takes the punishment: hold a five- or six-toughness beater to unlock a large X, then route the counters into a token or a spent blocker you were happy to lose. That split is what makes the card sing. It rewards you for parking one fat creature on the table (as a ratings dial, not necessarily as ammunition) while letting you sink the cost into whatever you least want to keep. The counters are permanent, so whichever creature absorbs them is paying with its future, not renting out a single turn. And because the burn is one-sided, hitting each opponent and each creature they control while your own board is untouched by the spell, you are converting stored toughness into a clean sweep plus a chunk to the face. Red's asymmetrical damage effects usually ask the caster to bring their own scaling, metering power through life payment or spent permanents. This one banks it in a resource red almost never gets to spend on purpose: raw toughness sitting on a body that would otherwise just be attacking.