Pigment Storm

The trample-damage clause, ported off a creature and onto a burn spell. Fixed five-point removal has never been hard to price in red: the interesting move here is the excess-damage rule that trample keepers have always followed. Kill a two-toughness creature and the other three points spill onto its controller's face. The design ties the reach directly to what the removal overkills, so the spell scales with the target rather than reading as a flat five-to-any. Point it at a small blocker and it doubles as a burn spell; point it at a genuine threat and you pay full freight to remove it with nothing left over. That coupling does the balancing: the more a creature actually needs killing, the less collateral damage it grants, so the card never becomes an unconditional two-for-one against anything the opponent plays. It reads like a Char that decides for itself how much of its damage becomes reach, and the choice belongs to the board state rather than the caster. Five mana is the tax on the flexibility; an effect that would be oppressive at three or four is priced so it competes with a creature or a haymaker in the same slot rather than slotting in for free.