Wicked Reward

The pump is paid for in bodies, not just mana, and that single design decision is the whole card. Folding the sacrifice into the casting cost means the spell never exists without a creature you have already decided to part with, and the +4/+2 is sized to make that fodder count: a token or a chump you were going to lose anyway converts into a finishing swing at instant speed. The toughness half does quiet work too. The +2 lets the buffed attacker live through a block the donor never could have survived, so what you are really buying is favorable combat math, not raw damage. The cost is honest about itself: you spend a card and sacrifice a creature to enlarge one, a self-inflicted two-for-one that keeps a four-power instant-speed swing from being a free blowout. Where it shines is a board already tipping the wrong way, with a creature that has become a liability rather than an asset, and it asks you to cash that liability into a one-sided combat result. It is an early sketch of the sacrifice-payoff impulse that later sets would formalize into entire archetypes: the difference is that here the engine and the trick live in a single card, with no aristocrat triggers to soften the loss, only the bare exchange of a dying creature for a decisive hit.