Jagged Lightning

Two bolts, three damage each, split across a pair of creatures and nowhere else: that targeting restriction carries the entire design. The card cannot stack both shots onto one threat, cannot point a single point at a player, cannot do anything but clear two midsized blockers in a creature-on-creature game. That is exactly the board state the introductory Portal line wanted to model for someone still learning combat math, and the effect was scaled to feel generous in isolation rather than to survive comparison with the wider card pool. Charging this much for six damage looks indefensible next to any tournament burn spell, but the inefficiency is the feature, not the bug: a beginner product cannot afford to teach that red removal is cheap and flexible, because cheap and flexible is what makes red removal genuinely strong. Sorcery speed completes the lesson. Locked to your main phase, the card removes the instant-speed mind games (the ambush block, the end-step double-spell) that define real burn, leaving a clean board swing with no hidden timing. Read against its intended audience, every restriction here is doing pedagogical work. Read against the rest of Magic, it is a museum piece from an experiment in selling the game as a standalone box, where power was tuned to the box and not to the format.