Aftershock

A removal spell built on the oldest balancing lever in red's toolkit: take damage to widen the targeting. Red has always answered artifacts and lands, but it usually does so in separate cards with narrow scope: a Shatter for artifacts, a Stone Rain for lands, a burn spell for creatures. This collapses all three into a single catch-all that destroys an artifact, creature, or land with one cast, and the cost of that breadth is three damage to your own face. That self-damage is the limiter that prices the flexibility: a fixed, non-negotiable tax paid in damage rather than in the usual restriction of locking each effect to its own card. The four-mana sorcery speed is the other constraint, keeping the effect off the stack as a combat trick or end-step ambush and forcing you to spend a main phase on it. The result reads less like premium removal and more like an emergency valve: a card you reach for when one slot has to cover whatever shows up, accepting the life loss as the price of not knowing in advance what you will need to destroy. It belongs to a Tempest-era school of red design that bought versatility with life points, a lineage later printings would refine by trading raw breadth for cleaner conditions and tighter rates.