Welcome back to Name That Card! Today's card is a cost efficient board wipe and punisher. Unfortunately, the caster doesn't have full control as to how much the spell costs. For the record:

If there are no creatures, this cost and does nothing.
If there is one creature, this costs and deals 1 to that creature and each opponent.
If there are two creatures, this costs and deals 2 damage to those creatures and each opponent.
etc., ect..

But what is the card's name?

­Pyroclasm is taken, Cataclysm is taken... Rain of? Rain of Cats.

Name - Quantum Flames

Flavor Text - At the end of the alchemists of Kunlun's search to discover the essence of Fire, the land was scorched forevermore.

Reasoning: 'Mountain' made me think of Planes of Mountain and Seas, but that's hilariously already a plane in MTG, and I don't recall there being any alchemists. So, new plane idea is 'Kunlun' another mythological location.

Also since this card scaled so beautifully (great job JM!) i was inspired to interpret it as a 'mathematically perfect fire' which seemed hard to fit into the setting until I remembered there are six elements in Asian lore (chinese, im 99% sure but not certain), of which fire is indeed one.

Art could be a beautiful but outlandish countryside (which would be probably be the whole art direction for the set) being scorched by eerily-geometric cubes or spheres of flame. I'm sure there's a nice angle where you could invoke a sense of dread while also showing the balls/cubes of fire becoming larger as they spread from ground zero.

­Ignite Souls

I feel like there must be a way of retemplating this so it costs XR or similar without changing the real cost, but I can't immediately see what that would be

X is the number of creatures in play.
~ deals X damage to each creature and opponent.

Vitenka's X example is theoretically viable. Originally, I thought you might need extra words to stop players from paying more or less than , but rule 107.3a says "If a spell or activated ability has a mana cost, alternative cost, additional cost, and/or activation cost with an , [-X], or X in it, and the value of X isn’t defined by the text of that spell or ability, the controller of that spell or ability chooses and announces the value of X..." which infers that the value of X can be set by the card, and the caster can't choose a different number 'just cause'.

There's a weird wiggle going on with making this an X spell. Between casting the spell, and the spell's resolution, the number of creatures on the battlefield might change. With the X version, you lock in the cost and damage when you cast the spell. With my version, you look at the creatures on the battlefield when this spell resolves, count them up, then do your damage.

Unlike the usual X spell, that means this card doesn't have a mana value of everywhere but the stack. If there are ten creatures on the battlefield, you probably won't cascade into it. Though a lucky Erratic Explosion could hit for 10 damage. Likewise, if there are five creatures on the battlefield, and an opponent sacrifices their creature, they may now counter this spell with a Thoughtbind. Also, if your opponent is at exactly three life, and there are no creatures on the battlefield, you can cast this spell for , then while it's on the stack, cast Scatter the Seeds in response.

Since I wasn't sure that could be set by the card without an unintuitive sentence popping up, and because I thought it was more pleasing if it cared about how much damage it was dealing when the spell resolves, as opposed to when you cast it, I used . But there are so many strange corner cases with mana costs that adjust on the fly, that I'm guessing Wizards would probably stick with X. I can see a lot of mechanics built around "Count up a thing. That's the spell's cost.", and if I was in development, I'd probably argue for X just so I could see a common version of the spell at some point.

The way this is currently phrased it always has mana value 0. (And mana cost .) It will be affected by additional costs, like Lightning Axe or Ajani's Presence whose mana cost and value never changes, or Fireball, whose mana cost includes the X but not the extra bit that used to be templated as Y.

I think Vitenka's template nearly works. The weird old example to follow is Spoils of War, so I think this would have to actually be

­
X is the number of creatures on the battlefield as you cast this spell.
As long as you control a Mountain, ~ deals X damage to each creature and opponent.

...Oh, and you want a name? How about something evoking densely packed people... "Overcrowding", or... Clear the Crowds.

Oh, man, thank you Alex with the deep pull for Spoils of War. Seeing we have a model to work with, I'll probably be switching this over to an X spell shortly. Weird aside: I did think of making the casting cost be an asterisk like how the power/toughness works with Nightmare to ensure it did what I wanted it to do. But I figured that would simply look too weird.

Voting is up! Vote on your favorite card name here!

Edited to an X spell, despite my protestations. ;)

Froggychum wins this week with Quantum Flames.

See everybody in (((NTC #075))) for the diamond anniversary card!