Shower of Sparks

Split-target burn is a small, persistent corner of red's design space, and this single-mana instant is an early stab at it: one point to a creature, a separate point to a player or planeswalker, each target chosen on its own. The numbers are where it falls down. A single point of damage rarely kills anything you care about, and the point to the face is closer to a rounding error than a clock, so the appeal was never raw efficiency. It was the two-for-one shape: knock a one-toughness blocker or mana creature off the board while still chipping at the opponent, all on one card at instant speed. That flexibility carries a cost most burn does not, because the spell demands both a creature and a player or planeswalker as legal targets; with no creature to point at, it cannot be cast for the face point alone. Red has returned to this template again and again, usually with bigger numbers bolted on to make the rate matter, but the structural idea (spread your reach so no single point goes to waste) traces back to cheap instants like this. The trouble is scale: the values here are simply too small to carry the design. It reads as a proof of concept rather than a staple, a good card's framework shrunk to the point where the lack of impact outweighs the flexibility.