Fire Ambush

Three damage to any target is one of the oldest, cleanest jobs in red, and Lightning Bolt set the rate everyone else pays against: one red mana, no qualifiers, instant speed. Fire Ambush carries the same payload for one extra generic mana and trades the instant for a sorcery, and that pair of restrictions is the whole story. The generic mana is the smaller tax; the sorcery speed is the one that bites. You cannot hold this up at end of step, cannot answer an attacker mid-combat despite the name, cannot punish a topdeck on the opponent's turn. What remains is the freedom to send three damage wherever it matters on your own main phase: a creature, a planeswalker, a face. That is a real effect at a real rate, just not a competitive one in any era where Lightning Bolt, Incinerate, or Lightning Strike are on the table. Its honest place is measured common-rarity burn: a single line of text that does exactly what it says and never asks the player to think twice. This is the kind of design that fills out a color's removal suite without lifting the ceiling, the deliberately fair version printed for environments that wanted three-damage red at a controlled power level rather than the unrestricted original.