Flaming Gambit

The damage is aimed at a face, but the defender holds the steering wheel: name a price in life or a planeswalker's loyalty, and they can pay it by feeding a creature to the flames instead. That redirect clause is the whole tension. You are not buying X damage to a player; you are buying a choice you do not control, and the opponent will always route it to whichever side hurts them least. Against an empty board it burns them; against a board with a chump in it, you are paying a sorcery's worth of mana at instant speed to kill a creature you did not get to pick. The design reads as a punisher card, the kind that wants the opponent to flinch either way, but in practice the redirect makes both outcomes lean defensive rather than lethal. Flashback at least lets the gambit run twice, casting from the yard for a heavier red commitment, which suits the slow, attrition-minded posture the card already implies. It belongs to a brief lineage of "you choose" burn that tried to make damage interactive on the receiving end, an idea later printings mostly abandoned because handing the target's controller the decision tends to neuter the punch.