Spark Elemental

Three power of trampling haste off one red mana, gone the instant the turn ends: this is burn dressed as a creature, and the math is deliberate. The body deals its damage exactly once, on the turn it arrives, then sacrifices itself before it can block, chump, or sit on the table as a future threat. The forced end-step sacrifice pays for the rate: a 3/1 haste with no strings would be a real creature, but stripping away everything else a creature does leaves only the swing, so the card reads less like a beater and more like a three-damage bolt with a toughness the opponent can interact with. Trample matters more than the small number suggests: against a single blocker it still pushes most of the damage through, so the defender cannot simply throw a token in front of it and erase the investment. The lineage is older than the keyword soup makes it look, a descendant of the suicidal one-shot attacker that trades permanence for tempo, and a sibling to later red one-drops that lean on haste to turn a creature slot into reach. Where it belongs is in decks that count damage to the opponent's face, not decks that want a board: a burn spell that happens to be vulnerable to instant-speed removal and happy to feed a sacrifice payoff before it leaves on its own.