Cleansing Screech

Five mana for four damage is a rate that stopped being competitive somewhere in the game's first decade, and this card knows it. It exists in a two-player introductory product built to teach the fundamentals of the color pie, where the lesson red is meant to deliver is simple: point damage goes wherever you need it, at a creature, a planeswalker, or a face. The design intentionally trades efficiency for legibility. A new player does not need to weigh the sorcery-speed restriction against instant-speed burn or calculate whether the mana investment is worth it; they need to see, in one clean line, that red removes a threat by pointing damage at it. Everything a more expensive burn spell might layer on (a spectacle discount, a death trigger, a scaling clause) is stripped away so the underlying verb stands alone. That is why the number is four rather than three: it is generous enough to kill most of what a beginner will face without asking them to read a second sentence. Compared against the burn spells the game has priced against for decades, this is deliberately behind the curve. It is a teaching tool wearing the costume of a removal spell.