Unstable Footing

The first line is the part most players skip past, and it is the part worth reading. For a single red mana, you buy a turn where no damage can be prevented: fog effects, Story Circle's color taxes, and the whole catalogue of prevention tricks stop working. The five-damage kicked mode is the headline, but unkicked this is a one-mana answer to an entire category of defensive cards, the kind that fold a burn deck's lethal turn. That makes the card structurally unusual. Most burn spells care only about getting the damage onto the stack; this one cares about what happens to that damage on the way to a face, and it is willing to spend a slot solving the prevention problem rather than just adding more reach. The kicker exists so the card is not dead weight when the opponent has no prevention going: pay and it becomes a five-to-the-dome finisher in its own right. The tension the design resolves is the classic burn-deck anxiety about drawing the wrong half: a hate piece you cannot deploy proactively, or a damage spell that whiffs against a fog. Unstable Footing is built to be both, scaling from a cheap insurance policy early to a closing blow late, with the prevention clause attached to either mode so the disruption never goes away.