Smelt

One mana, instant speed, one job: erase an artifact and ask nothing else of you. This is the unconditional version of red's oldest answer to artifacts, the line that runs through Shatter and its many siblings. Where Shatter charges two mana for the same destroy clause, this trims the rate to the floor; red almost never prices its artifact removal lower. The flat one-mana cost is the entire pitch. Against an opponent leaning on a single key artifact, a turn-one or instant-speed answer you can leave up under a lone untapped Mountain reshapes how the game's resources trade. The cost of that efficiency is rigidity: the target line reads artifact and only artifact, so when the board has nothing to point it at, the card does nothing at all. That is the standing bargain of color-pie hosers. Red gets to obliterate the thing it hates most, cheaply and at instant speed, in exchange for blanks when the table does not cooperate. The design has never needed updating because the math has not changed since the earliest sets printed this effect; the only lever left to pull was the mana cost, and this is what it looks like when you pull it all the way down.