Sizzle

Three damage to each opponent at sorcery speed, with no creature to kill and no way to redirect the burn anywhere but the face: this is reach reduced to its single function. It cannot answer a blocker, cannot stop a threat, and matters only when a life total is the only target left. The math is unkind in a duel. At three a cast you need roughly seven copies to bury a twenty-life opponent, three mana each time to do work Lightning Bolt does for one (without the targeting flexibility, granted). The "each opponent" clause is the lone justification: in a multiplayer pod the damage multiplies while the cost holds flat, so a rate that is unplayable heads-up becomes a passable group-burn payoff. That is the whole pitch, and it is also a snapshot of an early era when red's direct damage was still priced cautiously, before the format settled on one-mana-three-damage as the line every burn spell would be judged against. This is what red reach looked like before Wizards trusted the color with a clean way to ignore the board and win.