By Force

The X-cost is the whole bet: a single red mana plus whatever generic mana you can muster turns one card into a scalable sweeper, clearing a board's worth of equipment, mana rocks, or signets in a single sorcery. That flexibility is also the liability. Pay nothing extra and you blank it (X of zero destroys nothing); commit hard and you have tapped out for a spell that does nothing against a deck presenting no artifacts to hit. It is a scalpel that becomes a sledgehammer only when the table overcommits to the right permanents. The trade red has always accepted with artifact answers surfaces cleanly here: cheap per-target rate in exchange for being a dead draw when the opponent isn't holding up the right kind of target. Against a fixed-price option like Shatter, this lets you size the spell to the threat after you know the threat, the after-the-fact information advantage that makes scalable removal worth its variance. The sorcery-speed restriction keeps the bet proactive rather than reactive: you cannot hold it open to answer an artifact activated on your end step or in response to your own turn, so it functions as a board-clear you plan around, not a counter to an artifact's ability on the stack. The single red pip is the quiet detail that matters most: the color requirement never grows, so even a board-warping X is castable in any red deck that can find the lands.