Chandra's Pyrohelix

Two mana for two damage is below the going rate for direct burn, and the reason is the split: you are not paying for reach, you are paying for coverage. The card belongs to the arithmetic-on-the-stack school of red removal, the same design impulse behind sorceries like Forked Bolt and Arc Lightning, where the value was never the raw number but the ability to answer two small threats with a single card. Where Lightning Bolt buys three points pointed at one place, this buys the option to clear two one-toughness blockers, or to kill a creature while pushing a stray point to the face. The division is locked at announcement: you commit your targets and the split when the spell goes on the stack, not on resolution. That front-loaded choice is the cost of the modal feel. The timing wrinkle works in your favor, though, since a multi-target spell does not fizzle if one target leaves: lose one and it still resolves, dealing the assigned damage to whatever remains legal, so an opponent sacrificing one of your two marks does not blank the whole card. The two-point ceiling is the honest restriction. Anything bigger than a token or a one-drop walks through it, which fixes the card squarely against the go-wide boards it was built to punish.