Chain Lightning

What a stupid mess.

Perhaps I should back up a touch -- I have an irrational fondness for this card. I don't mean that my fondness is irrationally excessive; rather, the fact that I have any fondness for this card at all is irrational. It was the first Lightning Bolt variant and it was printed in the notoriously hard-to-find Legends set; the two factors combined to catapult it to an iconic status that's probably as powerful as Lightning Bolt's.

But the card -- or, rather, its design process -- has got a raft of problems.

1. It doesn't fundamentally change anything about Lightning Bolt. Bolt's power doesn't stem from its instant speed; Bolt's amazing because it kills about 75 percent of all creatures printed in Magic, and it's almost never a tempo loss. (Quite often, it's a tempo gain.) When there are no more creatures, it goes to the dome -- meaning it's never a dead card.
2. Sorcery's a real drawback, and legitimately constrains this card. However, that speed addresses Lightning Bolt's tempo, not its efficiency -- and that efficiency is the core of the card's power.
3. The card's other "drawback" is nothing of the sort. It doesn't exist against nonred decks. It's irrelevant if the opponent doesn't have RR open. Even if your opponent can drill it back at you, you're ahead on the tempo game -- and if you knew your opponent could pay RR, you're probably still ahead in every way that you care about. One of those ways is to spend RRR and dome your opponent or his or her duders twice for the low cost of 3 life. That's all upside for red, even if it feels like a bad black card. To top it all off, most design space opened by the bouncing effect is going to increase the card's damage, not limit it -- see Mogg Maniac and Furnace of Rath. (If you hadn't realized it before, it's not an accident those were both printed in the same block.)

I suspect that the designer(s) of this card wanted to create an alternative take on Lightning Bolt -- something that would complement or replace the premier burn, not slavishly copy it and double its redundancy. (Note that Incinerate in Mirage was fairly successful in this regard. Another note -- an additional 1 mana in the casting cost is far more effective at constraining tempo than sorcery speed is. A lesson for would-be designers.)

There's a ton of things we could do to fix this card without fixing it too much. There's the easy out:

This addresses a lot of the issues of Chain Lightning's drawback, but not all of them. First, it's still crazy wordy. Second, it's still going to swing your way rather than the opponent's more often than not. Finally, it can't go to the dome -- a too-serious drawback, but at 1 generic mana, the original's ability to hit players would simply be too good in dedicated burn decks. In short, the idea's pretty decent -- but it's just full of rough patches, especially in a spell that's as basic as a burn spell. (The drawback would be swingable in a different niche of spell -- it's just that burn thrives on efficiency and redundancy, something this drawback can't really impact.)

Personally, I'd rather that drawbacks are either really drawbacks -- and spelled out as such -- or they're quirks of a card, like Chisei, Heart of Ocean's upkeep ability. Chain Lightning's ability does neither; it masquerades as a drawback while it's actually an upside or is meaningless in nearly every situation. So, I'd rather that Chain Lightning blowded up a bunch of dudes at once, like a proto-Pyroclasm, than had some asinine "drawback" that was actually nothing of the sort.

OK, we'll go with former -- blowded up a bunch of dudes.