Scouring Sands

A one-mana red sweeper would be busted, so this asks for two and deals only a single point: the smallest amount of damage that still clears a battlefield of tokens and one-toughness creatures. That narrow band is the whole pricing logic. Against go-wide aggro it can erase a board; against anything sturdier the point of damage lands but rarely kills, softening blockers or setting up a follow-up burn spell rather than sweeping. The asymmetry is the unusual part. Where most red board wipes hit everything, this one spares your own creatures, which makes it a tool for a deck that wants to keep its own board while punishing an opponent who committed faster. The scry is the rider for the games where one damage is irrelevant: when the spell whiffs on the creatures that matter, you have at least filtered your next draw rather than spending two mana on nothing. Note that it sifts but does not replace itself; the card count still goes down, so the floor here is genuinely low, not a free look. It is a defensive role-player dressed in red's colors, a partial sweeper built for a specific kind of matchup rather than a flexible answer, and honest about it.