Seismic Shudder

The "without flying" clause is the entire mechanism, and it does something more deliberate than a power-level dial: it splits the battlefield by elevation rather than by toughness. Where the familiar X-damage sweepers ask how much you want to spend, this asks where you want the damage to land, sparing birds, drakes, and your own air force while wiping the ground clean of one-toughness tokens and weenies. Resolving at instant speed sharpens the trick further: held up through a combat step, it fires after a go-wide attacker has committed but before damage resolves, blunting an alpha strike from a board that has overextended into a single point of toughness apiece. The card is honest about both its reach and its limits. Against anything that has grown past one toughness, or that simply flies over the top, it is dead, and red has no built-in way to scale the effect upward. So it answers one shape of board (a flying-light ground swarm, the goblins-and-saprolings end of aggro) cleanly and answers nothing else at all. The lineage of cheap red effects that mow down small creatures runs long; this sits at the surgical end of it, trading the breadth of a true sweeper for the guarantee that it never costs you your own evasive threats. A directional filter rather than a hammer, built for the matchup where the opponent's plan and your own happen to live on different floors.