Unleash Shell

Red rarely gets to kill a genuinely large threat at instant speed, and when it does, the mana is usually the whole price. Five damage cleanly answers most creatures and threatens a planeswalker's loyalty from across the board, while the extra two points that fall on that permanent's controller turn every kill into a clock: chip damage that narrows the gap even as it clears a blocker. That splash of player damage is pure upside; you pay for it in the five mana, not in a restriction. The wrinkle is that the two damage is not free-aim burn: it always follows the controller of the thing you just destroyed, so you cannot redirect it at another opponent's face when the creature you want gone belongs to someone else. That tether pulls the card away from a clean answer like Terminate and toward a closing swing folded into removal. Five mana is a real tax, so the design targets the turns where an aggressive red deck needs its removal to keep counting toward lethal rather than merely trading down. It rewards the game state where clearing a blocker and shaving two off the opposing life total collapse into a single play: reach and tempo compressed into one line, at the cost of never getting to choose where the reach lands.