Torch Breath

A hoser wearing a burn spell's clothes. Strip away the color-hate machinery and what's left is a scalable X-damage instant that kills a creature or planeswalker: fine, if unexciting. The mean design lives in two clauses aimed squarely at one enemy. The uncounterable line means permission spells can never answer it, precisely the problem a counter-heavy board hates to face. Then the two-mana discount kicks in whenever the target is a blue permanent, so the pile of blue creatures and planeswalkers is billed the cheapest rate to be shot at, its counterspells inert. Red's color-contingent hosers go back a long way (spells that are dead weight against most of the field and back-breaking against one slice of it), but this one folds the hate into an ordinary removal template rather than bolting on a separate hate clause. What makes it quietly nasty is how little it announces itself: the counterspell the blue player built around is simply switched off. Bounce still works as an out, though: respond by returning the targeted creature to hand, and with no legal target left the spell will not resolve against anything. So the blue deck is not entirely helpless. It just has to spend the tempo of a save at instant speed rather than reach for the permission it wanted to lean on.