Forked Lightning

A multi-target burn spell from the era before Wizards trusted new players with the full rules engine. Portal's whole design conceit was a stripped-down game: no instants, no graveyard interaction, no targeting players directly, so a flexible removal package gets walled off into hitting only creatures. The distribution clause is where the design actually lives: four damage split across one, two, or three bodies turns a single card into a tunable answer, whether you bury one threat under all four or carve a pair down to size. The three-target mode forces a 2/1/1 split, a small constraint that keeps it from cleanly wiping a wide board of equal bodies; the math puzzle is the point, not an afterthought. That divided-damage template is an old red workhorse, the same skeleton that runs through Arc Lightning, and it rewards reading the board before committing rather than firing blind. The sorcery speed and the no-face-damage restriction are both Portal house rules rather than balance levers; in a set with instants and reach, the same effect would price differently. Read as a snapshot, it shows how much of red's identity Wizards was willing to keep in a teaching product: the arithmetic of dividing damage survived the simplification even when the timing and targeting got sanded down.