Consuming Bonfire

Two numbers, and the distance between them is the whole argument. Five mana for four damage to a non-Elemental creature is a deliberately steep rate, the kind of removal you only register because the second mode exists: seven damage, enough to bury almost any Treefolk ever printed, against the one tribe the spell exists to punish. This is burn with a grudge. The Elemental type line on the sorcery itself matters too, since the first mode can never point at your own kind, which quietly names the archetype meant to be holding it. As tribal removal it sits among a narrow school of cards that price their flexibility against a single creature type rather than the board at large, paying for an oversized payoff with an undersized default. The seven-damage clause is not a margin; it is a statement about which trees the fire was set for. Strip away the modal framing and what remains is an asymmetry built into the spell's own bones: ordinary against the field, lethal against the forest.