Flame Discharge

Scalable X-damage removal that pays you back for building around Equipment and Auras: control a modified creature as you cast it and the same mana buys two extra damage, no death-trigger or spectacle tax attached. The design is deliberately elastic. Early, it snipes a one-toughness dork for a red and a splash of X; late, it points X plus two at a planeswalker or a fatty and clears it in a single cast. The modified rider is clean because it asks a question an Equipment-and-Auras board already answers for free: if you have a suited-up creature in play, the bonus is simply on, and you were assembling that board regardless. The instant timing is the quiet part doing the real work. Because it holds up, the spell doubles as a combat blowout, ambushing an attacker mid-swing while your own modified creature sits back on defense. It descends from red's line of variable-cost burn (Fireball, Blaze, Fanning the Flames) but narrows the aim to creatures and planeswalkers, trading the reach-to-the-face flexibility of those older designs for a rate that scales with a board you can actually engineer. The two-damage kicker looks small on paper and is decisive in practice: it converts a linear one-to-one X spell into one that penalizes you for not committing to a modified-creature plan, which is precisely the archetype it was drawn to reward.