Variant on lightningbolt- or shock+. I think (?) wizards deliberately avoid having too many cheap 3-burn spells, but this can be this set's lightning bolt as it will never be in standard.

I assume this will have a similar effect on the game as lightning bolt, but be not quite as good.

I toyed with several other variants, and tried to avoid making a worse-than-lightnigbolt spell, but eventually decided the simplest was best.

Given I can't ever play lightning bolt again, I'd run 4 of these in every deck forever if I bought this set.

Oh no, a red deck that starts on 17 life, in exchange for I get to play lightning bolt again I'd make that exchange any time.

I think what I'm trying to say is: a) I love it b) It's too good for wizards to print, the meanies. c) Bring back manaburn.

Why can't you ever play Lightning Bolt again?

Vitenka: You know wizards printed lightning bolt in Magic 2010 and 2011 right? I was totally surprised, but the official line is that it's very strong, and they intend shock to be the baseline, but are now happy for lightning bolt to be in standard some of the time, as long as it isn't in standard ALL of the time. I think the secondary market value is like £1? Which is very high for a common, but it is really good.

And lightning bolt is maybe a bit cheesy for casual decks, but if your deck isn't horribly overpowered elsewhere (and yours really aren't :)) I don't see any problem playing lightning bolt.

Hence this. I agree that in a red deck it's effectively as good as lightning bolt, but given that they DID print lightning bolt, I don't see any problem with a flavourful alternative. Not every deck will run it over a shock-plus variant, even if all dedicated red decks do.

The only problem is if it's in extended at the same time as lightning bolt people can run eight of them, but then, there are some conditional "R. Inst. 2/4 damage" spells which are nearly as good, given how rarely you want to do 3 damage rather than 2 on turn one. And in casual you're constrained by convention and availability, not cost. And in legacy, I don't think four more lightning bolts is going to make a difference (?)

Vitenka: You know Wizards have reprinted Lightning Bolt in the past two core sets, right?

Alex: Huh. If I edit my comment, I see all of it, but the display doesn't show the first paragraph. There's the same problem with this comment if I put a newline in here. Text was: "Vitenka: You know wizards printed lightning bolt in Magic 2010 and 2011 right? I was totally surprised, but the official line is that it's very strong, and they intend shock to be the baseline, but are now happy for lightning bolt to be in standard some of the time, as long as it isn't in standard ALL of the time. I think the secondary market value is like £1? Which is very high for a common, but it is really good."

No, I didn't know that.

How could I possibly know that?

In which case, um, yeah, don't see how this card could survive.

Jack: That's really weird and irritating. I think Maruku is getting confused, most likely by the colons. I've already got code in to protect lines which start with smilies, which otherwise get eaten. I'll take another look at it...

Alex: Sympathy. Don't worry about it on my account, but I thought you'd want to know.

Vitenka: No, you've no particular reason to know that, but it seemed likely you'd seen it mentioned on an article on the wizards website, or had a friend who played with cards from a recent set and saw it there, or guessed from my description, even though it turned out you hadn't.

But as mentioned, there are lots of red burn cards less good than lightning bolt (a pedant might say, ALL of them), and nearly-as-good-ones like this have no place in the same set (or an adjacent set) as lightning bolt as they would make the combination overpowered, but in another set that chooses not to have lightning bolt, it might as well choose to have a nearly-as-good one rather than a nice-but-definitely-worse one like shock.