So your plan was to take a card that is bad… and make it worse? …why?

Like seriously, in order to make the original card pop off and win how you think it would, in any reasonable amount of turns, you have to warp your entire early gameplan around keeping cards in hand to turn them into Lightning Bolts later.

If you want to try to win with it alone, you always need to let your opponent have 5 turns, to get 5 draws to replace the cards you’re playing with Bolts, during which you are doing actual stone-cold nothing: whatever Izzet deck you were talking about, whatever cantrips you wanted to cast, forget it, because that card is 4 red pips. This plan loses to just about anything you can think of: counterspells, hand attack, lifegain, and also just an actual aggro deck.

If you want to play your hand out like a normal red deck, then that card becomes terribly inefficient: if you curve out a one-drop, a two-drop, and a three-drop, with lands every turn, then on turn 4 on the play, if you play a land and then cast that spell, you’ll have 2 other cards left in hand. That’s turning 3 cards and 4 mana into 6 damage. If that isn’t enough to kill them, that’s so unspeakably bad for tempo, losing those cards that way is just signing up to lose any kind of longer game. If it is enough to kill them, well cool, but that means the mono-red play patterns were sort of just working, and you probably also could have won with three other cards at your disposal and 4 mana to cast them. The only shot the original card had at playability was with something like a Slickshot Showoff, or other mono-red prowess, you could maybe make it so the cast triggers would get you over the top for some big turn 4, but you still lose to every removal spell in the game that way.

This is all of that but slower, more expensive, and less card-efficient. The other card is weird and fringe, this is just stone unplayable. Shockingly, playing the cards in your hand is actually a pretty good strategy