Searing Rays

A burn spell that taxes the board you read across the table, and the one you built too. The damage scales off creatures of a single color you name, one point apiece, which means its ceiling lives entirely in the opponent's commitment: against a flooded mono-white weenie board it can chip a real chunk off a life total, and against a control deck holding up nothing it deals zero. The escape valve cuts both ways: a board spread thin across colors leaves almost nothing for the spell to count. A three-color midrange deck blunts it where mono-color aggro walks straight into the fire, and a player who diversifies can render the spell inert before you ever choose. It applies to every player symmetrically, so in a multiplayer pod the chosen color rakes the entire table at once, punishing whoever overcommitted to a single hue. The wager is the whole card: a damage spell priced against an opponent's creature count rather than a fixed number, where the caster bets on a board skewed toward dense single-color commitments. When that read is right, the return is outsized; when it is wrong, the card never leaves your hand to good effect. The symmetry it imposes is total, but the math only ever favors whoever guessed the table correctly, which makes this a spell you evaluate by scouting the room, not by reading its own text.