Hell to Pay

X-damage burn has always spent its overflow into nothing: point six at a two-toughness creature and the extra four evaporate. This one collects the change. The overkill converts directly into tapped Treasure, which means the spell is priced not just on what it kills but on how badly you overpay to kill it. That reframes the sequencing math entirely. A tidy, efficient removal spell wants to size X exactly to the target's toughness; this one rewards the opposite instinct, aiming a bloated X at a small blocker and banking the difference toward whatever comes next turn. The Treasure arrives tapped, so it never fuels the same turn's follow-up, which is the restraint that keeps the card from spiraling: you commit the mana this turn and recoup it the next. The design sits in a lineage of red cards that soften the tempo cost of removal (Seething Song and its ilk generated raw mana; the Treasure wave attached it to bodies and artifacts), but this attaches the mana specifically to the act of killing something too small, turning red's habitual inefficiency into a resource. It is a removal spell that gets better the more you waste it, which is a strange and specific thing to build.