Photon Blast Barrage

Most X-damage spreaders divide a fixed pool: Fireball, Rolling Thunder, and their kin buy X total damage that you carve up, spread thin or piled deep. This one inverts the math. The base spell is a flat one damage to one creature, and X does nothing to the damage itself; it multiplies the spell, copying it X times with fresh targets available for each copy. Set X to four and you get five instances of one-damage-to-a-creature, each independently redirectable. On rate that reads like a scaled-down pinger, but the copy trigger fires on cast, before the spell resolves, so the whole barrage stacks up and lands as a single wave: five separate darts you can aim at five separate bodies, or bundle onto fewer to punch through toughness. Against a swarm of small creatures it works as a one-sided sweeper that never touches your own board. Against one large threat it converges. The copies also change how the spell survives interaction: they are created directly on the stack by the trigger rather than cast, so a counter aimed at the original leaves the barrage intact, and the darts resolve one by one no matter what happens to the spell that spawned them. What looks like a modest burn card is a modular removal engine whose shape you decide at announcement, and whose ceiling is set entirely by how much mana you can pour into the X.