Mind Bomb

A symmetrical Faustian bargain dressed up as a one-mana sorcery: every player faces the same arithmetic, and the math is deliberately cruel. Three is the ceiling for both the damage and the discard, so the choice is always how much of your hand you are willing to spend to avoid the burn. Discard three and take nothing; cling to your cards and eat the full three. The clever wrinkle is that it taxes the caster too, which is what keeps a one-mana effect like this honest. You point it at an opponent sitting on a full grip and dependent on those cards, but you cannot exempt yourself from the same decision, so the card rewards being the player who is already running on fumes. That self-inclusion is what separates it from a clean disruption spell: it is closer to a wager than a weapon, and the value depends entirely on who has the most to lose when the bill comes due. Discard-as-fuel strategies invert the downside, since cards you would gladly pitch make the damage clause irrelevant while still draining everyone else. The friction lives inside the choice rather than the rate: where modern design would bolt on a finality counter or a per-player cap, this leans on raw symmetry to balance the effect, trusting the players to do the math and bleed accordingly.