Lightning Axe

Discarding a card is rarely framed as a cost worth paying, but this design makes the discard the entire point. Five damage at instant speed for a single red mana is a rate that flirts with breaking red removal: it kills the overwhelming majority of creatures that ever see play, and it does so cheaply enough to compete with the format's premier burn. The discard is what balances it, and the cleverness is that the cost converts to setup in any deck building toward a full graveyard anyway. Pitching a delve enabler, a reanimation target, or a madness card you would rather cast for free turns the downside into a tempo gain, which is why this spell tends to live in decks that were going to fill the bin regardless. The pay clause is a release valve, not a plan: it keeps the card from being dead in topdeck mode, but paying full freight means losing the exchange badly, and that is exactly the bind an empty-handed caster faces. The asymmetry is the whole design: it offers premium efficiency to decks holding a surplus they want to spend, and a steep tax to decks that have already emptied their hand or want every card they draw. That split, generous to graveyard strategies and punishing to anyone forced to cast it on fumes, is why it recurs wherever red wants to trade a resource it already planned to throw away.