Crap. On occasion my laptop flips out and does four things in random succession, forcing me to lose my previous comment. Most times, CTRL-Z fixes it, but not this time. I miss the old laptops that had a mouse that popped out the side. Ah well.

Truth is, losing my comments was a good idea because I kept contradicting myself. I like this card, but my mind made giant leaps as to what it did when I half-read it. I thought it granted Protection from Red to any player until end of turn. It doesn't. I can't help thinking that would be a more fun card - stopping Fireballs by hitting yourself aside the head first.

But let's not talk about that, let's talk about this. I'm not sure if Wizards would print something like this, purely because of group game formats where you have 'opponents' who aren't really opponents. My own play group plays a lot of 'secret agenda' Magic. If I cast this on an 'opponent' who is clearly not an opponent, I can give him Protection from Red forever. That's crazy.

Other than that, this card may not be powerful enough? It's hard to say. Surely, there aren't any cards that deal 4 to a player for , but I think the reason they don't do that is less because it's too powerful, and more because "They don't wanna." The drawback is incredibly powerful, and simultaneously has no value. Obviously, you play SfP when you plan to kill someone. It's a bit like a Legendary Instant, in that casting multiples does nothing.

My head keeps spinning around the card. It's quite the puzzler, and you sure got the rarity down right. I'm going to stop worrying about it and start liking it. If it encourages me to write whole articles about it, then it is, at the very least, a good conversation piece, which makes it a good card in my book.

This was pretty much intended to just be a conversation piece, and it looks like it succeeded. Obviously, in a red deck, you could only use this as a finisher, but you could also splash it in an aggro deck that was mainly a different color. At the very least, it's an interesting card.

Wouldn't it sometimes be a bad idea to use this on a "not an opponent" in a multiplayer game, since eventually it could come down to just being the two of you? Then you'd be screwed if you were mono-red.

Yeah, I think this is very interesting in the questions it raises.

I think there's two main questions. Firstly, "what range of sorcery-speed player-burn is constructed playable"? I think it's hard for player-burn to be playable, since it doesn't directly affect board state, but if it's good enough, it's obviously well worth it. And there's a bit of congestion in burn: lava axe costs 5, but for R you might well expect a 3-damage equivalent, or more?

The other question is, "how much does the only-once restriction affect it". Although this looks more unusual, I think it's actually a lot more straight-forward. Player burn will usually be played last anyway, so an aggro deck will automatically run one copy of this if the damage is efficient enough, and then have the same calculation for "how many copies if I only want to draw one per game" as decks commonly have to make for expensive finishers you probably don't want to play twice.

FWIW, this card might actually be very similar to Landslide, given that landslide probably does a similar amount of damage, and also effectively says "play this last. play only one copy of it"...

On "being a bad idea to use this on a 'not an opponent' in a multiplayer game.": Potentially. But that doesn't make the card any more or less fun. Let's say Click and Clack have an agreement. Click says that whenever he gets SfP, he'll cast it on Clack, if Clack agrees to not attack him. Clack agrees to this, but attacks Click 50% of the time, anyways. How does this agreement effect Roger? It doesn't. It has nothing to do with Roger, but Roger gets the short end of the stick. Clack will get protection from red whenever this card pops up, and Roger will lose to Clack every time, because he plays mono-red. That interaction makes Roger furious... and that's not a response you want to see when playing a game.

Jack is right about the odd costs of player burn: Lava Spike, Flames of the Blood Hand, Lava Axe.

Although recently Vexing Devil has brought us a card that's very similar to this: 4 damage to a player, costs , has a drawback, rare.

I think this design is spot on.