Meteor Blast

The X here doesn't scale the damage; it scales the spread. Four damage is fixed, repeated across as many separate targets as you can pay for, which makes this a sweeper that bills you per creature rather than per battlefield. The triple-red commitment is the cost of that flexibility: mass removal that kills four-toughness creatures wherever it points, or a finisher that splits its four-damage chunks between the table's threats and the players themselves (the wording reaches any target, so faces are fair game). That target-by-target structure sets it apart from wrath-style red removal that hits everything indiscriminately. You choose the casualties, which means you can leave your own board standing while clearing three opponents' blockers, or spread damage across a single player and their two best creatures in one cast. What you cannot do is pile every instance onto one face: each of the X targets must be a distinct object or player, so this never collapses into a single oversized burn spell. The cost is real arithmetic instead: each additional target is another mana stacked on top of the already-steep color requirement, so the spell rewards a deck built to flood mana late and cash it into a one-shot reset. It rarely behaves like a clean sweeper and rarely like a pure burn play; it lives between those modes and forces the decision as you cast it, exactly how much of the table you can afford to set on fire.