Heated Argument

Six damage at instant speed answers nearly anything with a toughness bar, and the design leans into that overkill rather than trimming it to a tidier number. The premium sits in the flexibility: a graveyard exile bends what reads as a straightforward creature-kill spell into two extra points aimed at the creature's controller, so removing a blocker also chips at the player who deployed it. That optional clause is the whole tension. The exile is a choice made during resolution, not a cost gating the cast, but it still competes with everything else that wants your graveyard: delve, flashback, escape, recursion loops. Whether two points to a player outweighs a card sitting in your bin is a call that shifts turn to turn, and the spell only forces it once the removal is already on the stack and resolving. Red removal has long split into two lanes: cheap, efficient burn that trades up on rate, and expensive answers that stop caring what they are pointed at. This sits in the second lane, paying a real mana premium for a damage number that ignores almost every reasonable toughness ceiling, then bolting on a rider that squeezes incremental reach out of a graveyard you no longer need. It is not built to be efficient; the argument the design makes is that a removal spell can do a second job on the turn it kills something, converting spent graveyard fodder into a small, guaranteed nudge toward the opponent's life total.