Farideh's Fireball

Five damage to a creature or planeswalker always resolves, exactly as printed, no matter what number the twenty-sided die shows. That is the part you paid for, and it is fixed. The randomness governs a rider that sits entirely outside the removal: two extra damage that either lands on every player or only on your opponents, depending on the roll. Land in the high band and the two damage stays across the table; land low and it splashes back onto your own life total too. So the wager is never whether your kill happens. It is whether the incidental burn boomerangs onto you. That is an unusual thing for a burn spell to do: it hands you a bonus you did not pay for, then bolts on a chance the bonus turns hostile. The structure, a safe outcome forking away from a self-punishing one, threads through the whole family of dice-driven spells this belongs to, and the mana rate is priced assuming you sometimes land wrong. The two life to yourself bites hardest in racing spots and mirrors, where clipping your own total while chipping the table can flip a game. This is removal built for a player content to let a random number decide whether the kill also carries a small self-inflicted tax, and that willingness, not the raw rate, is the real cost the design asks you to weigh.