Burn at the Stake
Three damage per body is a deliberately steep multiplier, and the whole card is built around the moment a wide red board turns sideways for reach instead of combat. The math escalates fast: five creatures is fifteen damage to the face from a single sorcery, which is the kind of number that ends a game the turn a token deck stalls on the ground. The cost structure is the tension. Tapping the creatures is an additional cost, not a sacrifice, so they survive to attack later, but committing them to this spell means they cannot also block or swing on the turn you cast it. That tradeoff is what keeps a triple-red five-drop from being a strictly-better finisher: the payoff scales with how many creatures you are willing to take out of the combat equation, and the spell only delivers if the board was already assembled. It rewards the go-wide red strategies that have always struggled to close from a stalled position, converting a horde of small bodies into a single haymaker that does not care about toughness, profitable blocks, or a clogged board. The triple-red pip is the other guardrail, locking it firmly into mono-red or heavily red builds where the token engine and the burn payoff share a color identity.
