Shard Volley

Three damage for one red mana is Lightning Bolt's rate, and that headline number is exactly the trap: the card asks for the same marquee figure while quietly charging a land on top of the mana. The additional cost is paid on the way to the stack, before the spell resolves, so the sacrificed land is gone whether the burn connects or gets fizzled by a hexproof flicker or a counter. That makes the trade lopsided in the abstract (a permanent for an effect plenty of red one-drops produce without the tax), and it is why the card never displaced the bolts and shocks it imitates. Where it earns its keep is the narrow band of decks that treat lands as a resource to be spent rather than accumulated: a hand flooded with redundant lands, a board where one more point of reach closes the game, a turn where tempo matters more than the long game. The design is honest about its own tradeoff. It hands you a top-tier burn rate and makes you decide, every cast, whether three damage is worth more than the mana that funds your future turns. Most of the time it is not, which is precisely the calculation the card is built to force.