Homing Lightning

Four mana for four damage to one creature is a rate nobody builds a deck around, which makes the secondary clause the whole reason this card exists. By hitting every creature sharing the target's name, the spell is engineered to punish redundancy: the token armies, the four-of beaters, the playsets of identical creatures that aggressive and tribal decks lean on. Against those boards it stops being overpriced removal and becomes a one-card sweeper, scaling its damage with how committed the opponent is to a single name. That ceiling is paid for with a brutal floor. Against a table of distinct creatures it is just expensive burn, and the spell rewards information (knowing the opponent has flooded the board with copies) as much as it rewards mana spent. Conditionality like that is unusual for removal, which normally wants to be live in every game it shows up in; this one is built to be excellent in a narrow band of matchups and unremarkable everywhere else. It is a hoser dressed as a removal spell, and its value lives entirely in how much sameness it can catch.