Light Up the Night

An X-damage burn spell is normally red's cleanest offer: point it at a face, scale it with your mana, done. The flashback clause here rewrites that math by changing what pays for the second casting. It still costs mana (), but the X isn't bought at all: you fund it by stripping loyalty counters from your own planeswalkers. That turns the graveyard copy into a way to cash out a walker that's already done its work or is about to die anyway, an unusual resource conversion for a color that rarely gets to trade loyalty for reach. The extra point of damage against creatures and planeswalkers nods at the same idea from the other side, making this a genuine removal option rather than a pure face-burn finisher, so a walker can be both the fuel and a legitimate target. What keeps the flashback honest is the clause that X can't be zero when cast that way: you must commit real loyalty to fire it, and the card exiles afterward, so there is no looping the discount. The design rewards a deck that treats loyalty as a currency to be spent rather than a total to be defended, running planeswalkers not to ultimate but to bank damage you release on a later turn. Two casts, two economies: one mana-hungry and immediate, one that asks you to have built a battlefield worth cannibalizing.