Electrostatic Bolt

Two damage for a single red is a slightly undersized rate, fair but never exciting against ordinary creatures; the doubling against artifact creatures is the whole reason it exists. This is hate stapled onto a serviceable burn spell, built for boards made of metal: against an artifact creature it reads as four damage at instant speed for one mana, a price that should not buy that much. The design trick is that the bonus costs nothing to access. There is no condition to set up, no card to discard, no creature to control; the spell simply checks the target's type line and resolves harder when it finds metal. That makes it a clean expression of conditional efficiency, where the floor is a real card and the ceiling is a beating, and the contents of the opposing board decide which one you get rather than your sequencing. It scales with the thing it punishes: unremarkable when no artifacts are present, oppressive the moment the board fills with cheap metal bodies, which is exactly how targeted hate is supposed to behave. Strip the artifact clause and you have a weak burn spell that only hits creatures; keep it, and you have one of the sharpest tools ever printed for shooting down the small, cheap artifact creatures that aggressive metal decks lean on.