Explosive Revelation

Burn spells normally price their damage exactly: you pay for three, you deal three. This one fixes the damage to a variable you control only by deckbuilding (the mana value of the next nonland card off the top of your library), and pays you back with that card put into your hand for the trouble. The lands you pass on the way go to the bottom; nothing is lost, nothing is milled. That makes it a removal spell and a dig in the same five mana, but the dig is the part that warps how you build around it. Stuff the deck with cheap spells and the damage shrinks toward irrelevance; lean top-heavy and the first nonland card you hit is likely to be worth a lot. The card stops at the very first nonland it sees, so the number is whatever that card happens to cost, not the biggest bomb buried somewhere below. The reward sits with decks that run expensive spells and want to find them anyway. The "choose any target" line is the flexibility, though it comes with a catch most burn does not have: you commit to the target as you cast, before you reveal a single card, so you are aiming at a creature, planeswalker, or player without yet knowing how much damage you are about to deal. A burn spell that doubles as card advantage was never going to be efficient at either job; what it offers instead is the refusal to choose between them.