Torrent of Fire

Five mana for a burn spell is a bad rate until you make it pay you for the rest of your board. The damage scales off the single most expensive permanent you control, which turns this from a Lava Axe variant into a payoff for decks already built around something fat: a high-cost artifact, a monstrous dragon, an enchantment that ate half your turn to cast. The design lives in that one-line conversion of a deck's top-end commitment into reach, and it asks you to have done the work elsewhere first. Where most red removal prices itself for tempo, this one is structural: it rewards a curve that already wants to be heavy, then refunds part of that investment as a finishing blow that can ignore the battlefield entirely and point at a player. The ceiling is real (mana values do not cap), but so is the floor, and the floor is grim if your most expensive permanent is the spell you cast last turn. It is a payoff card masquerading as a burn spell, and reading it as the latter is how you end up disappointed.