Hey, Jack! Is there anything you would like for me, or anyone else to design for this slot?

Yes please. I feel silly saying it, but we don't have enough burn spells in red :) We want a few more, one for this slot, and a couple in the uncommon slots.

It seems a set usually has one fairly straightforward burn spell -- shock, lightning bolt, brimstone volley -- and a couple more that are a little more complicated (fling, harvest pyre, etc). I was provisionally counting "damage equal to the number of tapped creatures" or "as an additional cost, tap any number of creatures" as the simple slot, but if someone suggests something simpler, that could probably bump this into CR10 or CR11.

Feel free to suggest alternatives to Seismic Strike as well; it's a reprint that seems appropriate, but we don't have to keep it.

Hmm... I'll have to come up with something later. I'm not sure "number of tapped creatures" is a good idea if our mechanical identity is "something happens when all your creatures are tapped". I might be overthinking this, though.

Provisionally, may I suggest:
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Sorcery
Deal 2 damage to target creature or player. If you control no untapped creatures, deal 4 damage instead.

I mean, that trick is overdone, but it seems like the standard to beat.

"deal damage = number of creatures which attacked this turn?"

I know what you mean about "number of tapped creatures". I thought of it because often doing 1 or 2 damage is plenty so it doesn't make much difference, and it seemed a more elegant way of implementing a variable shock, but you're right, maybe it's not on theme enough.

I agree, "2, or 4 if blah" is a solid choice -- I didn't want to do that right away, but it's often the correct choice. (It can probably cost R Instant, judging from previous implementations.) Yeah, lets see if we can think of anything we like more :)

Howabout a "Surprise! I'm active!" variation?

Violent Zephyr
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Instant
Tap all creatures you control. Deal 3 damage to target creature or player.

It looks bad, but, because it's an instant, it should play well. Maybe too well for Lightning Bolt stats.

Also, I'm pretty sure that we need a gigantic rolling snowball as a spell on one of these cards...

ROFL. Yes, I'd forgotten we should be looking for snow themes. The snowball is awesome :)

Um. Yeah. It's plain old bolt in a pure-red aggro deck (since whatever creatures you have will be tapped from attacking anyway) and it's almost always going to be used after you've declared blockers (so who cares about the tap, except in multiplayer?) The one time it will be a disadvantage is when you draw it (or were tapped out) and need to kill something before it loses summoning sickness.

Then again, I think we should just reprint lightning bolt.

Fair enough. I do think that there should be an instant speed "tap all your creatures", but I also agree that most people will long for Lightning Bolt when they see a Lightning Bolt that is situationaly better, but generally more annoying.

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I agree an instant-speed tap all is a good idea, and I think this is a reasonable place for it.

I think reprinting or recreating lightning bolt in a casual set is less bad than doing it in an official expansion, because it doesn't automatically co-exist with whatever other red burn spells are currently in standard, so although any "R. Inst. 3 damage," is often as problematic as lightning bolt whatever the drawback, I think it's ok to print it if we want it.

That said, this may be more interesting at two damage, as then the "can I use it situationally" is more prominent, and (fitting in with the monocolor theme) it's much less attractive to non-red decks.

OK, violent zephyr was my favourite suggestion for this slot. I picked 1R 4dmg, but it could be anything like R 1dmg, R 2dmg, R 3dmg, 1R 2dmg, 1R 3dmg, 1R 4dmg, 2R 3dmg, 3R 4dmg depending how much we want to push it. I think it wants to be better than average in a red deck, but worse than average splashed into a deck which doesn't want to tap everything every turn.

1R 4dmg seems pretty aggressive. I'd rather have a Volcanic Hammer / Incinerate than a... I'm not sure there's ever been 4 damage for before; Flame Javelin was just . Yeah, searching shows that it's just Sonic Burst and a bunch of random conditionals, of which Flame Slash is the best. This is a drawback in most decks, but I think it's so good that it'd be picked by more or less any player who has or thinks they can get any manafixing, making it less available to the red player... Of course a cost of might help alleviate that.

It seems there's always been a bit of a gap between 1CMC and 4CMC burn spells, I guess because the standard environment always wants a strong cheap burn spell, usually at R, and that limits the opportunity to print anything ar 1R or 2R without making too many good spells in standard. So I think there's more opportunity to make a strong R, 1R or 2R burn spell in a block which isn't going to be part of standard, even if wizards haven't printed one recently.

That said, I agree this probably wants to be toned down. I'll reduce it a bit, but we'll almost certainly want to move it around after playtesting.

I could see this being 4 damage if it was sorcery speed. In fact, I have a hard time seeing how tapping all your creatures at instant speed is relevant except in very rare scenarios that involve things like killing your opponent's creature before they have regeneration mana up.

I know the drawback of sorcery speed is a drag, but at least it seems like a drawback you're working around. Finding out that you got screwed by a 'no-drawback' instant because you just happen to need to use it at sorcery speed... well... I'd assume that would cause more people to frown. That, by the way, is very weird, I confess.

Edit: Wait! Ha! I designed this card and intended it as a combat trick! That's funny. I see where I was going with that, but there's probably a cautionary Cursed Scroll story in there somewhere. Okay, I got to admit, the combat trick makes me curious... but if we're to do that, I'd suggest not costing it efficiently so that, when a person intends to use it for that, they are using it for that.

Yeah, when I said "making it less available to the red player", I meant "making the instant-speed suddenly-tapped-out effect less available to the red player" - i.e. the combat trick you're referring to. It's probably worth aiming to identify the burn spells we expect to be efficient and the burn spells we expect to be less so. I could see arguments both ways for which of those should have the instant tap-out rider on it though.