Soul of Shandalar

The design job here is to be a threat that survives its own death. The activated ability is a repeatable split-burn: pay five mana to throw three damage at a player or planeswalker and split three more onto a creature they control, a two-for-one that answers a blocker while it chips at the dome. What separates this Avatar from the long line of expensive red beaters is the second clause, which lets it keep firing from the graveyard for the same cost before exiling itself. Kill it and you have not stopped it; you have only moved the bill from the battlefield to the yard, where it discharges one final round of removal-plus-reach. That redundancy is the point: a finisher built to grind through removal-heavy decks that would otherwise pick off any six-drop on sight. The five-mana price per activation is what keeps it fair, a mana sink for the long game where a two-shot burn engine slowly bleeds the opponent from two zones. Each color in the Soul cycle got a top-end creature with a graveyard echo; red's leans hardest into reach, turning a single body into a sustained drip of direct damage that closes games whether or not it is still on the field.