Why is this card so controversial?

Yeah, its combination of efficiency, flexibility, and speed makes it almost too good. Other than formats where absurd combos are the norm, any red deck that can legally run Lightning Bolt probably wants to run Lightning Bolt.

A sorcery speed version only able to target creatures could still be playable in a lot of standard formats.

I wonder how far this goes?

It's very versatile since you can use it for creature removal, or to quickly knock down a player's life total. It's as cheap as it can be. It invented the four-card limit. And it's an excellent example of how noncreature decks just completely raped creature decks back in the early days of Magic, despite the fact that nominally, they're supposed to be equal. It's taken them decades to close the gap between creatures and noncreatures. It's still not perfect, but it's certainly a lot better than when Magic began.

...

>Good burn is rare lately
I think the best example of this was when people were excited to have Shock back in standard with Aether Revolt.

It's the most powerful spell of all time. Seven manas can win you the game instantly

>someone out there unironically believes this
kek

>6 mana draw 1

Not bad, Tron would love it

3 damage is a bit too much, wouldn't you agree?

Bolt does more to deform the overall balance of the game than just about any other prominent, legal card. It's the most efficient, most versatile card for its cost which tends to trade so well in mana expenditure with what it is being used against that makes anything trade-able with it above 3+ mana essentially garbage

It warps whatever Standard it's in, every time.

In Modern it was the most played card for a while, not counting fetches. It's still up there at 25% usage over the past two months on mtgtop8.

Burn is even viable in Legacy. 7 bolts to the face, less if your creatures stick obviously, can still do the trick.

I'm of the opinion that there should be efficient answers to threats, while others believe that it shouldn't be so easy to remove creatures and Planeswalkers. I guess this is where there's "controversy."

Cycling at least is a (mostly) uncounterable option.

Any creature with 3 or less toughness becomes irrelevant outside of their etb ability.

Thats because in the past creatures were just one of many pathways to victory, and for the most part top decks were still creature based, just look at every single game winning deck for worlds going all the back to the beginning. There are only a handful of non creature based strategies that were successful. People really like to overstate how weak creatures supposedly were.

Yeah, but even in that case you're paying 3 mana in order to get rid of a garbage card and draw something else.

Far better to just have an actual good card instead.

There was literally never a time when you played a vanilla creature just to play a vanilla creature unless it was unfairly huge for its mana cost. You're the same kind of shithead that thinks Yugioh used to be played with mostly normal monsters too, right?

But creatures used to be really, really bad. Now they're better and more cost efficient, and besides some of them like rhino, this is a good change.

There was a time when the majority of monsters you attacked with were normal monsters, yes.
But that was when there was only one set to work with. MAYBE the second, I forget. It didn't last long at all, and even then yeah there were a bunch of flips and shit like man eaters - but you didn't attack with that crap. Just your high powered 4stars and Summoned Skulls.

It's the single solitary argument people who want to keep R down use to argue that the color "might have the potential to be unbalanced", while at the same time clapping like fucking circus seals whenever any other color(more often than not U) get something actually broken.

Motherfuckers trying to have their cake and eat it too.

Blue has been shit for just as long as Red. MtG is very much a Black/Green game right now

Red is actually relatively strong in Standard right now, but the power is concentrated into cards like Glorybringer and Chandra.

The same reason almost any other magic card is considered 'good'. It's slightly better than other cards that are almost the same thing by either 1 damage, 1 cost, or ability to cast somehow.

Magic is a game of having a deck of cards that are areal 'slightly better' than your opponent. Only like 15% of cards ever printed aren't jank.

I was unaware blue has been shit for a quarter century

>more often than not U
Blue is support tier, along with red and white.

This desu

Because it's too powerful for Standard.

>t. Mark Rosewater, who upped the mana cost of the card to 3

You'd be surprised at how good Bolt can be at 3 CMC. And it's inteded to be a good limited card, not a standard powerhouse

Unless you got a 4drop on deck, you're wasting tempo.

Yeah, I'm sure a 3 drop bolt would be fine in a format where you have a limited selection of cards to work with.

But you know what would also be fine? Just printing lightning strike as a 2 drop version so it'll also be a decent option outside of limited. Unless you're going to try and suggest that a 2 mana bolt would be too strong for a sealed format as a method of removal.

if it were instant speed it'd be at least workable

Yeah, it's not like Temur Energy and Mardu Vehicles aren't already one of the decks to beat even without extra reach.

What are you talking about?

It fucking sucks at 3.

And limited doesn't help the fact that red hasn't been relevant in two years or something.

The decks on top of the meta are temur energy/mardu vehicles in standard, grixis DS in modern, grixis delver/ANT/4c leovold in legacy, and they all play red in some capacity.

And what are they currently running as their burn/removal spell of choice?

I'm not saying that open fire isn't shit, i'm saying that while RDW isn't competitive red as a color is still very much relevant

Too expensive!

Those are not red decks. Red is a concept, an ideal. Not a splash for 2 mana spot removal.

Standard RG pummeler not pure enough? What about RW/naya burn in modern?

It doesn't suck at 3. Have you drafted HOU? Played sealed? It's still one of the best red cards in the format, and R/W Exert is one of the best archetypes.

>no true redsman

It's not controversial, it just defines the top end of playable cards in red. There is literally no better burn spell than Bolt if it's available in the format.

It also creates an effective barrier for creatures that have less than 4 toughness; because they immediately die to Bolt.

If you remember when Flametongue Kavu was standard-legal (and I'm sure you don't), that was another effective "gatekeeper" card, where if you played a creature with less than 4 toughness, it would automatically get killed by a meta full of Flametongue Kavu (and possibly 2 for 1'd when FTK merc'd it and then traded for another creature). Think of how Glorybringer limits the playable creatures and planeswalkers in standard just from threatening its exert ability.

MaRo isn't even a developer holy shit

>creatures with less than 4 toughness die to 3 damage
very insightful

I remember when everyone wanted Bolt and Counterspell.

Now, we would just be happy with Lightning Strike and fucking Mana Leak kek

Or Divination

Like, really, Divination is too strong for standard now? What?

You can't cast lightning bolt 7 times dipfuck.

You mean "competitive" Magic only has 15% of all legal cards to use. If you're not playing to win like some sort of tryhard there's suddenly only 33% jank as opposed to 85%.

With Panoptic Mirror you can

>durr what is Lava Spike, Chain Lightning, Searing Blaze, or pic related

>use 7 mana to cast a card
>so you can spend 7 mana on another card to cast it 7 times

Chain lightning is the better answer though, and really even if you only cast bolt 4 times you just need 8 more damage, and you can easily manage to cast those bolts and another burn spell or two within the first three turns, assuming you draw them.

Is a joke, I only posted it because you can literally cast Lightning Bolt 7 times with it. Otherwise your only other way to do it literally seven times in a row is utilizing Flashback effects.

By my count you can cast "lightning Bolt" 24 times.
>4 Lightning Bolt
>4 Lava Spike
>4 Rift Bolt
>4 Chain Lightning
>4 Shard Volley
>4 Bump in the Night

Am I missing any?

You aren't casting it you're copying it. Also most red decks will kill you before you can draw all those cards, so you're wrong. Fucking magic nerds.

>calling people Magic nerds
>cares about the difference between casting and copying

You're still hitting the opponent with seven Lightning Bolt spells on the stack, dipstick.

Actually, I'm casting cards very similar to lightning bolt. You know, the other 1 mana : 3 damage spells?

Because Red isn't allowed to have nice things

Did you know there is a deck called 7bolt?

i'm pretty sure there's no red deck that will kill as fast as burn does

some combo decks might but they aren't really "red"

3 damage as an instant for 1 mana, as opposed to other cards such as firebolt, which has 2 damage for 1 mana, meanwhile other cards such as magma hammer will cost 3 for 3 damage as an instant, and Lava Axe costs 5 for 5 damage as an instant.
And then there are cards that cost 4 mana for 3 damage as a sorcery.
As a result lightning bolt comes off unbalanced as WotC cant playtest.

not really related but this was one of my favorite cards as a kid

>divided any way you choose
So 4 damage to everything?

you could divide by a fraction

It's just a metric for magic's current powerlevel. A lot of people get buttblasted that bolt keeps getting nurfed but that's just burn babies being butthurt

Eh, it was a different time. Exile was fuck all rare, so sometime you might actually want this thing to stop specific cards

Blue is in this weird area. It gets to play in a lot of areas other colours don't get to touch at all but it's rarely efficient enough to actually dominate despite that.

Why is this card so controversial
i don't get it

>Why is this card so controversial?

Compare the Stronghold/Tempest/Exodus cycle that gave us Lightning Blast (4 damage, 4 mana) and Shock (2 damage, 1 mana)

Because you couldn't use Lightning Bolt, both of those saw play (Lightning Blast not as much as Shock though) despite being strictly inferior.

A good way to see if a card is unbalanced is to see if everybody runs it.

Every red deck I heard of ran Lightning Bolt.

Note: This is before netdecking really became "a" "thing."

>Black
You mean white, user

This is one of those cards that's impossible to cast without a shit-eating grin.

Because it makes new players feel bad when I dont use it on the first bear they cast.
>tfw wishing I could get mana leak back

Maximum efficiency, relevant both as removal and reach.

It's the epitome of red as a color.

>White gets "fair" Countermagic the likes of Mana Leak or with tradeoffs
>Red gets volatile Countermagic, stuff like "Counter target spell, deal damage to yourself equal to its manacost" or "Counter target spell, its controller Cascades"
>Blue gets straight up reliable, appropriately priced Countermagic

I'm convinced this is way it should have been from the beginning.

The reason why White didn't get outright counters beyond Mana Tithe, Lapse of Certainty, and Judge's Familiar is because it's apparently too good when it has access to on-color countermagic.
As in, Mana Tithe was originally going to be a different counterspell but was changed because it made things Too Good. I think it was Mana Leak.

I still think they could and should do it know. Do a grand color pie shakeup, redraw the lines in the sand and give the colors a proper identity again. I know they are obsessed with the old pie, but the concepts are just busted up by twentyfive years of game design and a lot of new ideas and concepts could be integrated now.

Black has my favorite counterspell

The weird thing with Black is that on one hand it's supposed to be the color of "Anything - for a price", but on the other hand it's hard to do that without infringing and dilluting its identity too hard.
You could give counters to UBR instead of WUR but B could get counters anyway, every now and then. Personally, I'd love it if they'd strengthen the "Anything for a price" part of B.

Because there are hundreds of creature cards that would be viable if it didn't exist.

Pic related should be the basis of Red countermagic. You don't just nullify what would happen, you pick it up and hurl it back twice as hard.

Fits the Red ideas of change and chaos better.

You rang?

>bolt is a really important card because of the bolt test
>people have been wanting reprints for ages
>it's way too strong to be reprinted
>meanwhile in modern it's seeing less and less play because people are playing cheap fatties that don't get killed by bolt anymore

Ok guys I think I fixed red. You know how lately they've been pushing the "exile the top card of your library, you may play it until end of turn" shit which is 75% of the time now what red wants and can lose them advantage by exiling a card they might need? What if they added something like "if you choose not to cast it, it deals damage equal to its CMC/3 damage/2 damage/ to target creature /or player"?

Chandra's +1 is a powerful ability yes.

The problem with those cards is that they're usually costed like card draw, but are weaker because you have to cast them right away and might not have the mana for it.

>When ~ enters the battlefield, exile the top card of your library with 2 chaos counters on it. It can be played while it has at least 1 chaos counter on it. At the beginning of your upkeep, remove a chaos counter from that card.
It becomes way too fucking wordy though. Could work as a keyword Chaos X which gives it X chaos counters.

And there it is.

Why not just use 'draw then discard' looting effects, since those are proven to actually be okay.

Chancellor of the Dross, if you have it in your opening hand.

>half
Is the card itself not worth anything?

Bah.

For good measure:
> Vexing Devil
> Browbeat
> Spark Elemental

So you don't burn out.
> Grim Lavamancer
> Agressive Mining

this is the kinda shit that red needs, cards that force taking chances onto your opponent and forcing them to make hard decisions

No. Red needs Lightning Bolt in Standard and anyone who disagrees is retarded.