Traumatic Critique

Two spells stapled together at a discount, priced so the discount is the whole tension. The X-damage half wants to be big; the card-selection half is fixed regardless of how much you pump into X. That means the floor is never dead: even with X at zero you pay two mana to draw two and discard one at instant speed, which turns a burn spell you drew at the wrong moment into a filtering spell you cast on the end step. The Izzet color pairing has spent years chasing exactly this profile, a card that behaves like removal when you have a target and like card selection when you don't, and the reason it works is that the two modes don't compete for the same resource: mana scales the damage, the draw-then-discard runs on its own. The looting rider also does quiet work with a graveyard, letting you draw the second card and then discard what you don't want rather than keeping it stranded in hand. What keeps it honest is that discard: you draw two and pitch one, so the effect replaces itself rather than nets a card, and the ceiling is a big burn spell that keeps your hand full rather than one that buries an opponent under extra cards. It rewards decks already built to cast instants on the opponent's turn and already able to make use of whatever gets discarded.