Reckless Air Strike

Two of red's oldest chores, folded into a single one-mana decision: burn a small flier out of the sky, or crack an artifact. Red already owns both jobs (Shatter and its many descendants have handled the artifact half since Alpha, and cheap direct damage is the color's birthright), so the compression here is the point, not the coverage. Both modes are hyper-conditional in isolation: the first clause does nothing against a ground-based board, the second is dead against a deck running no artifacts. Modality is what buys the scorching rate. Rather than pay a middling price for a spell that answers everything, you pay a bargain price for a spell that answers exactly one of two narrow threats, and you wager that at least one clause is live on any given draw. That wager is the whole design: run it where both categories show up often enough to keep both halves relevant, and it curdles into dead weight where they don't. The 3 damage is tuned to clear the fragile evasive bodies red most wants gone, not to reach into a color's larger threats, and the sorcery timing keeps it from doubling as a combat trick. The result is a piece of maindeck-or-out flexibility that lets one card cover the work of two competing half-answers, priced as if it were only one.