Galvanic Discharge

The mechanically-minted energy is the whole trick. Most one-mana red removal names its damage on the card and stops there; this hands you three energy on cast, then lets you spend any amount of it, drawing from that fresh trio plus whatever you've banked elsewhere. Point it at a small creature with no stockpile and it works out to a plain three-damage spell that leaves you no leftover energy, since you'd sink all three into the shot. The subtlety is that you don't have to: pay only one or two, and the unspent counters stay in your pool for later. In a deck built to hoard energy, the ceiling scales with how much you've stored; feed it six or seven and it clears a fatty or a mid-sized planeswalker for a single red. That coupling of payoff and partial generator in one card is the design point. It doesn't just spend the resource, it seeds it, which lowers the entry cost for the whole engine and means the first copy you cast still nets energy even before the bigger payoffs come online. Instant speed compounds this: energy accumulates across a game, so the removal spell you fire on turn two is a different spell from the one you fire on turn six, and holding it up rewards patience rather than punishing it. It reads as a modest burn spell and functions as a resource-conversion valve, only coherent once you see the archetype it's built to feed.