Thunder Strike

The combat trick reduced to its two most useful parts. First strike is the keyword that actually wins fights at instant speed: it lets a creature deal its damage first, so a defender pumped before blocks kills the attacker and walks away clean, and an attacker can punch through a larger blocker without taking a scratch back. The +2/+0 is the half that turns "trade" into "blowout," widening the gap between what your creature deals and what it survives. What you do not get is toughness, which is the honest cost of the package: this rewards aggression, not defense. A trick that gave first strike and a few points of toughness would be a stonewall, an answer to almost any attacker; pairing the keyword with raw power instead keeps it pointed forward, a tool for the creature that wants to be in the red zone rather than the one trying to hold the line. Clean, undersized red combat instants like this have been a constant of common-rarity removal-by-combat for a long time, the spell a tempo-minded red deck holds up to threaten any block.