Flames of the Firebrand
The flexibility tax is the whole transaction here. Three mana for three damage is a weak rate when a one-mana spell delivers the same, but those three points come unbundled: spread one apiece across three creatures, split two-and-one to clear a token swarm plus a holdout, or stacked onto a single face. The premium over the burn baseline buys the right to allocate the damage at all, and because targets and division are locked in on cast (chosen as the spell goes on the stack, not deferred to resolution), the choice is a deckbuilding-versus-flexibility trade made one turn at a time rather than a response to what your opponent does after you commit. Its closest kin is Arc Lightning, a functional twin from earlier in red's history, and the design lineage runs back through Pyrotechnics and forward into every "deals N damage divided as you choose" line printed since. What it answers cleanly is the X/1 problem: a board of small bodies that single-target removal can only chip at one at a time. Spreading damage among multiple creatures turns one card into a multi-body sweep, and that is the only context where the inflated rate earns itself. Outside it, this is overcosted burn, which is exactly the constraint that stops a divided-damage sorcery from crowding out the efficient single-target options it competes against.
