Lava Axe

The platonic example of a beginner-friendly card that teaches the wrong lesson. It comes from the Portal sets, where every spell was deliberately simplified for new players: spells could not target creatures, there was no instant-speed combat trickery, and there was no stack to parse. This is burn boiled down to a single legible transaction: a big number aimed at a face. The design intent reads clearly. A five-mana spell that does nothing but deal five damage to a player can be evaluated at a glance, and being readable from across the table was the whole purpose of the Portal line. The trouble is that readability and playability pull in opposite directions. The restriction that makes it teachable (it cannot hit creatures, only players and, by later templating, planeswalkers) is exactly the restriction that makes it a poor card in any context where attrition matters, because five mana for five damage with no flexibility loses to almost any spell that also affects the board. It survives as a curiosity and a benchmark for inefficiency: when designers want to illustrate how much a card's rate depends on its targeting flexibility, the comparison to a vanilla five-for-five reach spell is the cleanest one available. Lava Axe is the line on the graph where raw damage meets zero optionality, and almost everything red has printed since sits above it.