Strafe

Three damage for a single red mana is Lightning Bolt's rate, and the price for matching it is a restriction baked into Apocalypse-era color philosophy: the target cannot share red's own color. That clause is doing real strategic work. Mirror matches turn it into a dead card, which is exactly the point of an enemy-color set built around the tension between allied and opposing colors; Strafe punishes the field of nonred decks while leaving red's own creatures untouchable. It belongs to a long line of red removal that buys efficiency with a hoop to jump through, the same trade later spells made with Searing Blood's death trigger or Skewer the Critics' spectacle cost. Here the hoop is simply who you are pointing it at, which makes the card a clean expression of the era's design thesis: color identity as a deckbuilding constraint rather than a flavor footnote. Sorcery speed keeps it from contesting the stack the way an instant would, so it reads as proactive removal you plan around rather than a reactive answer held up at end of turn.