Strangle

Three damage for one red mana is the Lightning Bolt number, and the price this design pays for hitting it is the missing third target: creatures and planeswalkers only, never a face and never a stray artifact. That single omission does most of the balancing work. Bolt's reach lets it function as burn as much as removal; strip out the "any target" clause and you are left with a pure combat and threat answer, a spell that trades cleanly with three-toughness bodies and chips a real chunk off a planeswalker's loyalty. The sorcery timing is the second concession, and it matters more than the target restriction in practice: you cannot hold this up as a combat trick or a response, so the tempo it buys is spent on your own turn, on your own terms. Wizards has a habit of pricing red removal just under playable-as-burn to keep aggressive red honest, and cards like Searing Blood and Skewer the Critics each carry their own tax to that end. This one's tax is the plainest of the bunch: no upside rider, no death trigger, no spectacle cost, just a flat one-for-one at the Bolt rate with the aim narrowed to the board. It is the removal-only cousin of the game's most-copied instant, built to be exactly that and nothing more.