Flame Lash

The price of unconditional flexibility, paid in mana. Four damage to any target is the kind of effect red rarely gets without strings attached: no spectacle clause, no creature-only restriction, no requirement that the target be tapped or attacking. The cost of removing those strings is the cost itself. At four mana for four damage, this is a one-for-one trade priced well above the curve that Lightning Bolt established, and that gap is exactly the lever designers reach for when they want to hand a color an effect without letting it run the table. The body of work around it tells the story: red's cheap burn comes hedged (Searing Blood wants a creature small enough to die, Incinerate ate a smaller body for less mana), while the spells that hit anything at instant speed for real damage carry a tax. This one carries its tax in raw rate. What it offers in return is reliability: a removal spell that never reads its target's stats, never asks whether something is attacking, never cares if you flipped a card off the top this turn. It does one thing, at the moment you choose, and it does it to whatever you point it at. Four damage is the ceiling that stops it from outclassing the cheaper conditional burn it sits beside; four mana is the counterweight that fixes its role as the safe, expensive answer rather than the efficient one.