Viashino Branchrider

Kicker exists to let one card fill two curve slots, and this Lizard Warrior splits that duty across four turns without ever looking like two separate designs. Cast bare, it is a one-mana hasty poke with a firebreathing outlet: a cheap early clock that turns spare red mana into reach when the ground stalls. Pay the green kicker later and it strides in as a larger hasty threat carrying the same pump ability, so the one-drop you drew on the opening turn still earns its slot deep into the game. The green in that additional cost is the design signal. This is a red creature built to reward a splash into green with a scaling body, not a burst of value that evaporates once it resolves. The pump keeps it from ever going dead: whether it came down as a 1/1 or a counter-boosted body, extra mana always converts to damage in the same lane, and the firebreathing scales with whatever it entered as. Nothing about it demands attention, and nothing needs to. It is aggressive-midrange curve-filling built around a single problem: the punchy one-drop and the relevant late-game play are normally two different cards competing for the same deck, and here they occupy one line, drawn early and cast whenever the turn calls for it.