Shower of Coals

Threshold is the lever here, and it does the kind of work that defines an entire graveyard-matters design language: spend the early turns stocking the yard, and the late ones hit twice as hard. Below seven cards, this is a spread of 2 damage across up to three separate targets, the sort of split that picks off a pair of small creatures or trims a board while chipping at a player, but rarely closes anything by itself. Cross threshold and each of those targets takes 4 instead, enough to one-shot most early creatures or pressure a life total in a single sorcery. The targeting is strictly distributive: every chosen target takes the full 2 (or 4), and you can choose fewer than three, but you cannot pile multiple hits onto one creature to manufacture a single large burn. That makes it a reach-and-spread tool rather than a point-removal spell, and it never converts into a concentrated finisher no matter how full the graveyard gets. At five mana it sits in the bracket where rivals simply end games, so its case has always rested on two things being true at once: the deck has to be reliably over threshold by the time this resolves, and three smaller-but-real hits have to outweigh a cleaner single-target burn spell at the same price.