Blaze

Pay one red plus whatever you can spare, scale the damage one-for-one, point it wherever you want: this is the X-burn spell with every bell and whistle stripped off. Fireball got there first and split its damage across multiple targets; the trade here is that flexibility for a single uncapped bolt, which makes it the purer expression of what an X burn spell is supposed to do. The whole card is the conversion ratio. Every mana past the first turns into damage, and the only governor on that is sorcery speed: no combat trick, no end-step play to bait a counter, so aiming it at an opponent's life total costs your entire turn and your entire mana pool. That friction is exactly why an effect with no built-in ceiling stays fair. It rewards the deck that has reached the part of the game where mana is abundant and the only question left is how much closes things out. Stripped of keywords and rules subtlety, the function is legible from the text alone: spend more, do more. That legibility is why the shape keeps getting reprinted under new names with riders bolted on. This is the version with nothing attached, which is its own kind of statement.