Magma Jet

Two damage at instant speed has never been the selling point here; the scry 2 is. Burn in this color has always been priced on raw efficiency, and pure damage-per-mana is where Lightning Bolt and its descendants live. This took the other road: pay a damage point relative to the gold standard, and get a look at the top two cards of your deck in exchange, keeping or bottoming each to set up your next draws. That trade reframes what a removal spell is for. A deck built on this card isn't just clearing a blocker or pointing reach at a face; it's smoothing its draws while it does so, digging toward more gas or burying flooded lands. The scry resolves whether the damage mattered or not, which means even a Magma Jet pointed at an empty board is still doing work no plain two-damage instant could. That's the design lesson it quietly taught: card selection bolted onto an efficient effect raises the floor of the whole spell, because the worst-case mode is never truly blank. The later removal spells that paired filtering with damage owe their template to this idea, even when they spend the selection differently.