Thunder Magic

Scaling burn compressed into a single card, and a clean demonstration of how Tiered works: one base spell carrying three payment rungs, chosen and paid as the spell is cast. Pay nothing extra and it is a red one-drop that does 2 to a creature; add and it swings to 4; add on top of the base (seven mana all told) and it does 8, enough to kill nearly anything walking the ground. What Tiered addresses is the old bind of scaling removal being either dead early or overpriced late. The X-cost line answered that by paying per point of damage; this instead offers fixed rungs selected at cast time, so there is no floating variable to track, just a menu locked in when the spell goes on the stack. The trade is stiff efficiency at the top: the Thundaga rung asks a full seven mana to do what dedicated big-mana burn does more cheaply, and the card only ever points at creatures, never faces or planeswalkers. That narrowness is the tax for the flexibility. Early it clears a mana dork or a two-drop attacker for a single red; late, when the small mode has stopped mattering, the same card becomes the answer to a finisher. One slot, three answers, and the deck never has to decide at deckbuilding time which one it needed.