Detonate

What sets this apart from red's broader artifact-removal lineage is that it scales the punishment with the threat. Pay one red and a variable, name the target by its mana value, and that artifact's controller takes the same X to the face. The scaling clause is doing two distinct jobs at once: it caps the spell against cheap mana rocks (you cannot point this at a one-mana rock and get meaningful reach out of it) while opening a real punish window against the expensive lock pieces and game-ending artifacts that justify the investment. The no-regeneration rider matters in its own era, when protection on artifacts ran through regeneration shields rather than indestructible or hexproof keywords. What makes this a relic, though, is that it ties burn to the size of the thing it kills. Most of red's artifact answers either drop the controller-punish entirely or pin it to a flat number: Shatter is a clean destroy, Smash to Smithereens deals a fixed three, Vandalblast scales on artifact count rather than cost. Here the bigger the target, the harder the swing back, a holdover from a moment when red was still allowed to ask "how much did that cost you?" as part of its removal package. The variable damage has been trimmed down or cut away wherever later design has revisited the slot, leaving this an early statement of a removal philosophy the color has since narrowed.