Meteor Shower

The double-X cost is what to wrap your head around first: paying the variable mana twice means the damage scales at roughly half the rate of a single-X burn spell, a deliberate tax on the freedom that follows. That freedom is the division clause, the actual design lever here. A typical X-spell either dumps all its damage onto one target or follows a fixed split; this one lets you assign one damage to four creatures, four to one, or any partition between, declared as you cast it, with the plus-one nudging the arithmetic toward clean kills rather than one-short misses. The double-X is the toll that stops a flexible, multi-target removal spell from reading as a cheap sweeper. It is an early version of red's recurring idea that the caster, not the card, should carve up a board: the value lives in how precisely the damage is parceled out, not in raw total. Because the distribution locks in at cast time, there is no waiting to see how blockers fall or how the stack settles; you commit the math up front, and the pricing guarantees it never looks efficient on rate alone. What it sells is reach across multiple bodies in a single sorcery, with the targeting work pushed onto the player, the same labor later iterations of the effect would smooth over.