Volcanic Wind

The variable here is the whole pitch: X is the number of creatures on the battlefield as you cast this spell, counting every body including your own, including ones you have no interest in touching. A stalled board of eight creatures hands you eight damage to distribute, enough to clear several blockers at once or to finish a clutch of attackers. The free division is the real engine: you can spread the count across as many targets as you like, or dump it all onto one threat. Where a symmetric sweeper like Earthquake or Pyroclasm hits everything for a flat number, this one charges a flat count from the board census and then lets you aim it, so you can spare your own side entirely while the opponent's creatures still feed your total. Six mana at sorcery speed is a steep price for that flexibility, and the variance is deliberate: cast it into an empty board and it does nothing, cast it into a clogged standoff and it functionally costs zero scaling. The dependency on a full battlefield makes it a payoff for grindy midrange rather than an answer you can reliably hold for a specific threat. The design idea (scaling removal where you, not the symmetry, choose the targets) is something the game executes more cleanly now, but the tension between a fixed board-derived count and unrestricted distribution was a genuinely novel knob to turn.