Weight of Spires

A burn spell whose damage is dialed entirely by your opponent's manabase, which makes it the rare removal that scales with the very thing it is punishing. Against a basics-only deck it deals nothing; against a greedy three-color shockland-and-painland pile it can outright kill a four- or five-toughness creature for a single red mana. That conditionality is the whole bargain: the spell hands you a metagame call rather than a fixed effect, sharpening from dead card to premium removal exactly in proportion to how much your opponent has leaned on nonbasic fixing. It belongs to a small family of red answers that tax mana indulgence (Price of Progress and Ruination work the same lever on the land side), but this one points the punishment at a creature instead of the board, turning your opponent's color ambitions into a damage number on the stack. The design reads as a deliberate hoser: a card that does nothing in a mirror of clean manabases and everything against the kind of value-greedy deck that runs a dozen fetch-and-shock lands. Its ceiling is set by an opponent who overcommitted to fixing, which means it rewards reading the field before it rewards playing the card.