Boulder Salvo

Pay the full five and you get four damage to a single creature, a rate that would embarrass any removal spell asked to stand on its own. Cast a spell first, though, and the price collapses to , at which point four damage for two mana is genuinely sharp. The whole design lives in that gap. Surge is not a trigger and not a spell you wait for; it is an alternative cost, a permission checked at the moment you announce the spell, that asks only whether you or a teammate has already cast another spell this turn. Note the word: a spell, not an ability. Cracking a fetchland or firing off an activated ability does nothing for the discount; something has to have gone on the stack as a spell. So the card punishes the patient and rewards the player committed to flooding a turn with casts: it wants to be the second or third spell in a chain, not the opening play. The four damage is creature-only, aimed squarely at the board and never at faces or planeswalkers, which keeps it a tempo tool rather than a reach spell. It belongs to a small family of cost-reduction-by-activity designs where the printed number is a fiction you correct through sequencing, and the distance between the surge cost and the full cost is the entire strategic statement: the card is a lie about its own price, and playing well is how you tell the truth.