Sear

Two mana for four damage is the trade red instant-speed removal keeps circling back to: enough to kill nearly any creature that isn't a genuine haymaker, priced high enough that it can't touch a player's face. That restriction is the whole balance. Where Lightning Bolt's three damage to any target has always doubled as reach, cheap burn that can close a game from the hand, this variant pays for its bigger number by refusing to point at players at all. It answers a creature or a planeswalker, and nothing else. The result is a removal spell that leans purely defensive, priced for the midrange and control seats rather than the aggressive decks that want their burn to do double duty. The design lineage here runs through cards like Flame Slash and Roast, effects that traded flexibility for a damage figure that clears larger bodies, though this one buys back instant speed and the ability to hit planeswalkers that those sorcery-speed predecessors gave up. Four damage at instant speed is a meaningful threshold: it holds up through a combat step and catches a creature mid-attack. Against planeswalkers it works best as a follow-up, answering one that has already ticked up out of reach of smaller burn, since the caster gets to activate a fresh planeswalker before you can respond. What it will never do is reward you for keeping it in hand as a finisher, and that deliberate ceiling is exactly what separates the pure creature-answer from the burn spell that also happens to answer creatures.