Nahiri's Sacrifice

The X here is not paid in mana but in what you feed the spell: whatever you sacrifice sets both the fuel and the payload. A five-mana-value body traded away becomes five damage to split however you like; a token off a Treasure or a Clue costs you almost nothing and does almost nothing. That coupling is the whole design. Most X-damage sorceries scale with the mana you're willing to sink into them, so they reward flooding out; this one scales with the material you're willing to give up, which reads far more naturally in a deck already sacrificing artifacts and creatures for value. It rewards the aristocrats-and-fodder shell that wants its board turning over anyway, converting a creature that has already earned its keep into a flexible removal instrument on the way out. Where single-target burn asks you to pick one problem, the divided-damage clause lets one sacrifice clear two or three small blockers or finish a race across several attackers, which is exactly the split-value math a sacrifice engine tends to want. The catch that keeps it honest is that the ceiling lives entirely in your own board. Against an empty battlefield the spell is dead; it cannot be cast without something worth converting, and the something you convert is often the thing you'd rather keep. Red removal that asks you to spend your own permanents is a narrower tool than red removal that spends mana, but in the right engine that cost is a feature.