Rumbling Rockslide
Removal that scales with your own resource development, which is a strange design axis for red: the color that usually pays a flat rate to burn a flat number. Here the payment is temporal rather than mana-based. Cast it on turn four and you kill a four-toughness creature; cast it later, off a deck that stacks land after land, and you are answering things burn was never meant to touch. The friction is right there in the sequencing: the spell wants you to have done nothing but hit land drops, so it competes for the exact turns and mana you would rather spend developing a threat. It is a ramp payoff dressed as removal, which is why it belongs in decks that were going to sink resources into lands anyway (landfall shells, big-mana ramp) rather than in a lean tempo build that would just play a cheaper, unconditional answer. The comparison point is any red removal spell with a fixed damage number: those tell you exactly what they kill the moment you deckbuild them, while this one refuses to commit until the board state is known. That uncertainty is the cost of the ceiling. Sorcery speed seals the bargain, denying it the combat trick and end-step flexibility that would make an X-style effect genuinely dangerous.
