Shock

People say that "ohh this sucks compared to lightning bolt" The problem is.. that you can only have 4 cards of one kind in a deck. This adds to more and more burn capabilities to any burn deck.

Super card for this price.

yep have 4 of them, 4 lightning bolts, a couple of incinerates, and 4 volcanic hammers among other things in my red direct damage deck. Makes many people at my school at that deck since everything is cheap in it.

The sucessor to Lightning Bolt, every player needs a game set of four. I've seen this card swing tournaments all by itself.

Watered down lightning bolt, but still very effiecient and powerful. Red short list material, extremely useful to pick off creatures with so you can save the bolts and the incinerates for the player!

its a very nice card.

Some people say Shock sucks - compared to Lightning Bolt. Well, DUH! It's SUPPOSED to suck compared to Lightning Bolt; why do you think they stopped printing Lightning Bolt so long ago, and only recently brought it back? That's because it way waay too overpowered back then.
Shock was a decent card. I don't know of a red burn deck that wouldn't run at least a couple of shocks during the time of 8th and 9th Edition - that's because Shock was good compared to the standart back then.

good, but it fails when compared to incinerate and every single other actually decent burn spell.

Shock is great early removal or cool late game burn. By itself, shock is indeed a lesser powered Lightning Bolt, but its low cost and commonality mean that its splashable in almost any deck type that includes red. Many other more powerful spells exist however. Tarfire is arguably a better card, being able to be retrieved with Wort or tutored up with a Harbinger, but shock is a classic and borders on iconic. Still, if you want to burn something, there are bigger better options that should be thrown into the mix along with this bad boy.