Lightning Strike

Three damage to any target at instant speed for two mana, no rider, no condition, no strings on where it points: this is the deliberate half-step down from Lightning Bolt that lets any-target burn stay reprintable in a Standard-legal environment without warping it. The extra mana is the entire concession. Bolt's one-mana rate is the line Wizards has spent decades declining to repeat in current sets; Lightning Strike is what you print instead when you want the flexibility of burn that reaches face, creature, or planeswalker at a price the format can absorb. It clears the same three-toughness ceiling that defines the aggressive curve, kills most of the bodies a red deck needs gone, and saves the last points for the dome, but it asks the deck to commit a second land before it can do any of that. That tax does real structural work: it pushes the spell off turn one, thins the tempo it can generate, and stops it from becoming an automatic four-of in every red deck across every format. This is the workhorse template for honest burn, the efficient removal spell that returns set after set precisely because it does not break the math the way its one-mana ancestor does.