Trick Shot

Six damage at instant speed clears nearly any creature outside the truly enormous, and if that were the whole card, it would sit unremarkably in the long line of oversized red kill spells that charge dearly for reaching past the Lightning Bolt baseline. The wrinkle is the second clause, and it is narrower than it first reads: the splash of 2 damage lands only on a creature token, never on a real body and never on a noncreature permanent. That restriction does quiet flavor work (a marksman's ricochet catching a bystander made of nothing) while defining the card's job, which is to punish decks that flood the board with expendable bodies. Against a swarm of 1/1 chaff, thopters, or spirit tokens, the follow-through picks off a spare body for free; against a deck running two real threats, the rider is dead text and you have paid five mana for a large single-target burn. That conditionality is the entire trade: an oversized answer whose upside only materializes when the opponent has committed to a go-wide token plan. The rider is what elevates it above the plain expensive finisher, turning a guaranteed kill into a soft answer to a deckbuilding archetype without ever threatening a creature that actually matters to the game.