First Volley

The splash damage is the entire point. Trading a single shock-style ping for the ability to reach past the creature and clip its controller's life total is the kind of marginal value the Arcane subtype was built to reward: it sits in the splice-onto-Arcane chain alongside the rest of the spirit-and-arcane shell, where one card becomes the seed for a sequence and every point of incidental reach adds up. On its own, one damage to a creature and one to its pilot is barely removal; it kills the smallest of mana dorks and weenies, no more. What it offers instead is a clock that doesn't stop existing once the board stabilizes, a way to convert a removal-light spell into a fraction of a burn spell. That dual-direction damage was a recurring red experiment of the era, the design trying to find a price at which "deal damage to a creature and its controller" is fair: too cheap and it outclasses honest burn, too narrow and nobody runs it. This landed on the narrow side. The reward is conditional on building around the subtype rather than the card itself, which is why it reads as a piece of an engine rather than a spell you reach for in isolation.