Spark Spray

One damage rarely kills anything worth a card, so the design pays for the dead-card risk by stapling cycling to it: if the board has nothing small enough to point at, you spend the same red mana to dig for a real spell instead. That conversion is the entire pitch. The card is never a blank, because the worst case (no one-toughness target in sight) is still a fresh card off the top, and the upside is sniping a mana creature, a token, or the last point on a planeswalker the turn after combat. This is the template Wizards keeps returning to when it wants marginal removal without flooding a deck with cards that brick: tie the effect to a discard-to-draw clause and the floor stops mattering. The instant-speed window is what makes the removal half live at all, since one damage has to land in response to a pump spell, a sacrifice, or a return-from-the-graveyard trigger to matter; played proactively on your own turn it usually just trades down. Built for the slot where you want incidental reach plus insurance against drawing it when it does nothing, it asks almost nothing of a deck and gives back exactly as little as the situation allows.