Sundering Stroke

Seven damage divided as you choose among up to three targets is a perfectly ordinary top-of-curve burn package, the kind of flexible Fireball descendant that closes a game or picks off a couple of blockers. The card only becomes itself when you meet the color condition: pay for the whole spell with red mana, all seven of its total cost, and the effect stops dividing and starts multiplying, dealing a full seven to each of those targets instead. That fork is the entire design. Divided mode is a finisher; the amplified mode is a one-card sweep with reach stapled on, three creatures dead in a single cast, or a face taken to seven while their board burns alongside them. The threshold is what pays for that ceiling: it is only reachable by a deck committed enough to produce seven red mana from its sources, so the blowout mode rewards building around the card rather than splashing it. The sorcery speed and steep cost are the honest tax on that power; there is no ambush and no instant-speed trick here, just a haymaker you telegraph and then land once you have already won the mana war. The card lives entirely in the gap between "divided as you choose" and "to each of those permanents and/or players," and in the mono-red discipline required to flip between them.