Release the Gremlins
The doubled X in the cost is the design knob that keeps this from being a blowout. Most artifact-destruction scales linearly: pay one more, kill one more. Here the price of each additional target climbs in two-mana increments, so destroying three artifacts costs seven, and the curve flattens your ambitions long before your hand runs dry. The payoff is that every artifact that dies also hands you a 2/2 Gremlin, so the same card that strips their board also builds yours. That two-for-one structure (their permanent gone, your creature added) is the swing that makes the inefficiency tolerable. The flip side of the design is that it is dead with nothing to point at: X must be filled with target artifacts, so the spell needs a board to break before it does anything at all. There is no firing it into an empty field for free tokens, which keeps a removal spell honest rather than letting it double as a token-maker on demand. It is a sorcery, so there is no ambush at the end of an opponent's turn; you commit on your own main phase, with full information about how many artifacts are worth destroying. The result is a scaling answer that rewards waiting for a target-rich moment over firing early, and gives red a way to clear an artifact-heavy board while building toward its own clock.
