Magma Burst

Kicker as a tax you pay in cards instead of mana is the wrinkle worth dwelling on. The base mode is four mana for three damage to any target, overcosted for the work by the standards of red burn then or since. The kicker flips the math: sacrifice two lands and the spell splits into two independent three-damage shots, hitting a second creature, player, or planeswalker. That is real reach, but the price comes out of your own board, not your hand or your mana count, a rarer and more interesting cost than kicker usually charged. Most kickers of the era wanted extra colored mana you happened to have lying around; this one demands you dismantle the engine that casts your other spells. The result scales with the late game in raw effect while punishing you for getting there slowly: by the time two extra lands are expendable, you are either flooded or far enough ahead that the second shot closes things out. Requiring the two targets to differ keeps the spell from doubling up on a single must-kill threat, so the kicked mode reads as a deliberate two-for-one rather than overkill insurance. A card of its moment, from an era when red was willing to spend permanents for tempo it could not otherwise afford.