Radiant Flames

The whole spell is a wager on your manabase, but the wager has a ceiling: at three mana, the most distinct colors you can ever pour into it is three, so the damage tops out at three to each creature. That is the design honesty of converge here. The cost never moves; what moves is the payoff, and you only reach the top of the curve when your fixing is good enough to spend a red, a white, and a green (or any third color) on turn three. Cast it off two colors and it is a Pyroclasm with extra steps, a strictly worse sweeper than the cards it imitates. Cast it off three and it climbs to a clean Anger of the Gods-sized board wipe without the exile clause or the self-damage. That sliding payoff makes it one of the tighter expressions of converge: a sweeper whose size is dictated entirely by deckbuilding discipline rather than by extra mana sunk into an X spell. It sits in a lineage of red board control that scales rather than fixes its damage, except the scaling is paid in color access instead of life or mana. A two-color shell is always holding a mediocre version of the card; the three-color shell that can reliably produce all three colors by the third turn is holding the version worth playing.