Sarkhan's Catharsis

Five mana to deal five damage to a player or a planeswalker, and nothing else, is a rate that reads a decade out of step with the burn it descends from. Fireball scaled with your mana; Banefire punched through counterspells; Lava Axe did the same five-to-the-dome for the same cost but at sorcery speed. What this instant adds over that older design is the timing and the planeswalker clause: it can wait for a walker to tick up to a threatening loyalty count and answer it at the end of a turn, or sit in hand as a lethal bolt to the face during a combat where the defender has tapped out. That is the entire case, and it is a narrow one. The card belongs to a cycle of planeswalker-flavored spells built to prop up a walker-heavy environment, where a five-mana instant aimed squarely at loyalty had a job worth the price. Stripped of that context, it is a slow, single-purpose finisher: no creatures in the target line, no scaling with mana, no way past a counterspell. The face-burn is the only reach it offers, and five damage for five mana is not enough of it to matter where the format runs faster answers. The catharsis is thematic, not mechanical.