Cinderclasm

Instant-speed damage to every creature has always been red's weak suit: most of the color's true sweepers are sorceries, cast on your own turn and telegraphed a turn early. This threads that gap. Two mana buys a wipe you can hold up through the opponent's attack step, blowing out an alpha strike or clearing dorks after they've committed. The kicker is the scaling lever, and the reason the card stays live across a game: unkicked, one point of damage to each creature answers a swarm of X/1 tokens; pay the extra red and it reaches two, catching the two-toughness bodies that carry most aggressive curves. Because the second point is optional rather than baked in, the card doesn't overpay early, when a single point already clears the relevant board. The comparison to a fixed sweep like Pyroclasm cuts the other way from what the rate suggests: Cinderclasm's kicked mode costs a red mana more to deal the same two damage. What you buy for that premium is the choice itself, the ability to spend one damage's worth of mana on turns when one damage is all the board asks for, and to save the second when it isn't there yet. The instant speed carries its own tension: the damage is symmetrical, so the skill is in reading when the opponent's board has outgrown yours and firing on their turn, not in trying to spare creatures from a sweep that hits everything.