Roast
Five damage at two mana is a number that should not exist on a removal spell, which is the entire point: the cost is the flying clause. Red has always priced its burn by the body it can kill, and a clean kill on the fattest ground threats for that little is a rate the color is not normally allowed to have. So the design hands the player a strict carve-out instead of a target restriction by toughness: almost anything earthbound dies, anything in the air walks free. That single exclusion does a surprising amount of structural work, since the creatures red most wants gone (the oversized midrange bodies, the ground-stalling defenders, the four- and five-toughness threats that laugh at smaller burn) are precisely the ones planted on the dirt, while the evasive fliers red is genuinely afraid of stay outside the spell's reach. The line cuts cleanly along the axis red is weakest on, which is how the rate stays honest without ever touching the damage number. It is a sorcery, too, so there is no instant-speed ambush, no holding it up as a combat trick: you spend your turn killing one creature and you commit to that exchange in advance. The result is a removal spell that reads as undercosted and plays as disciplined, a piece of red kill that solves the color's ground problem precisely while refusing to solve its air problem at all.




