Lightning Blast

The honest accounting of what a damage spell costs when you spell out the rate. Four damage at instant speed will kill almost anything worth killing and reach the dome when you need it, but the bill comes due in full: four mana for an effect that Lightning Bolt delivers for one. That gap is the whole story of red burn as a design problem. Across red's history, the rule has held steady: flexible, any-target removal at premium damage gets taxed hard on mana, while the cheap spells get fenced in with restrictions (conditional triggers, creature-only targeting, spectacle and the like). Lightning Blast sits at the unfenced end: no clauses, no qualifiers, the full menu of legal targets at instant speed. The price is the only constraint, and it is a real one. The card belongs to a recognizable family of four-mana, four-damage instants that trade efficiency for the comfort of never reading the fine print, the spell you reach for when the question is simply how much damage and where, not whether the rules will let you. It is what red removal looks like when the designers decline to be clever and simply charge for the privilege.