Vayne's Treachery

Most sacrifice-kicker designs pay you in raw stats or an extra body; this one scales the removal itself. The base mode is a -2/-2 that clears early creatures and tokens, while the kicked mode reaches -6/-6, enough to answer nearly anything a two-mana spell has business killing, paid for by feeding an artifact or creature into the spell. The result is two honest modes rather than one inflated one. Unkicked, it is a cheap answer to aggression or a token you want off the board; kicked, it converts a permanent you would rather not keep (a mana dork whose job is done, a Treasure or Clue you never spent, a token still sitting around) into a kill spell for something that would shrug off -2/-2. When the fodder is worth less than the target, the sacrifice cost is often no cost at all. Instant speed puts both modes at combat-trick timing: shrink an attacker into a fatal block or ambush a creature the instant its controller overcommits. The balancing act lives in the resource it consumes. The -6/-6 mode cannot fire off an empty board, so the bigger number is a reward for having already developed rather than a premium answer handed over cheap. That gating is what keeps the ceiling from being free: you earn the larger swing by spending a permanent you already have on the battlefield, not a card you can conjure on demand.