Tome Blast

Two damage to any target is a rate red has priced and re-priced across its history, and here the price gets paid twice. The opening cast is a modest two-mana Shock-plus-one, unremarkable on its own; the flashback cost is the whole reason to run it. Five mana for a second two-damage burn is a poor trade in any tempo-driven exchange, which is precisely the point of the design: this rewards attrition, not aggression, spending its encore in the long grind where every scrap of reach counts. The exile clause on flashback caps it at two uses total, so it reads less like efficient removal and more like a slow-burning card-advantage engine that saves its second charge for the empty-handed turns of a game that has stalled. That structural choice, front-loading a fair rate and back-loading an expensive encore, is what separates a burn spell you cast and forget from one that keeps mattering after it hits the yard. The lineage runs through every flashback burn spell that traded raw efficiency for a second life; the discipline is in accepting that the encore will always be overcosted, because a graveyard-recastable burn spell that was efficient both times would be a strictly-better staple rather than a role-player.