Rakdos's Return

The genius of this design is that it does two devastating things with a single X, and both scale off the same payment. Burn that hits players has a long lineage, and discard spells stretch back to the earliest sets, but stapling the two together means each point of X is doing double duty: the damage is also the size of the hand you strip, so an X of five is a five-point bolt to the face and a five-card Mind Twist in the same breath. The targeting clause is what keeps the rate from being absurd: it can only point at an opponent or a planeswalker, never at a creature, so it is purely a reach-and-resource spell rather than a removal tool. Against an empty hand it does nothing but burn; against a control deck clutching answers it functions as the haymaker that ends the game and salts the earth behind it, leaving the opponent topdecking with their life total already gutted. The sorcery speed and the all-in mana commitment are the cost of that swing: you tap out, you telegraph it, and you get one shot. That asymmetry punishes a defensive hand harder than an aggressive one, which is precisely the matchup where reach plus hand disruption matters most.