Explosive Prodigy

Vivid ties the payoff to a number most decks spend deckbuilding effort trying to keep small: the count of colors among your permanents. A mono-red board leaves this a two-mana 1/1 that pings for one, a rate no one would pay for. The moment you add fixing, a second color, a splash artifact that counts as its color, a multicolor permanent already on the field, the enters-the-battlefield burn scales into removal that would cost real mana on its own card. That inversion is the whole design: the mechanic asks a deck built to be greedy on colors to cash that greed in as damage, and it targets only creatures an opponent controls, so there is no accidental value on an empty board. The build tension is genuine. Splashing for the fourth or fifth color to turn this into a five-damage bolt on a body pulls a deck away from the disciplined manabase that keeps it consistent, and a whiff (fewer colors than the creature you need to kill) leaves you with a fragile 1/1 and a spent removal slot. The reason it outgrows a scaling Shock is durability: the damage arrives stapled to a permanent and repeats every time the creature re-enters, so recursion and blink turn a color-count metric into a repeatable removal engine. It rewards the exact greed it punishes when misbuilt.