A-Knockout Blow

The color-hoser reimagined as a rebate. Pay full freight and you have a serviceable, if conditional, answer: removal that hits any tapped creature and gains a little life back. But point it at a red creature and the price collapses to a single white mana, turning a mid-priced instant into the cheapest hard removal white can offer against a specific enemy. That cost-reduction clause is the whole design conceit: rather than a flat sideboard card that reads "destroy target red creature" and sits dead everywhere else, this bakes the anti-red bias into the mana cost while keeping the card live against the rest of the field. The tapped-creature restriction is the tax that pays for the discount. Because it is an instant, the natural window is the opponent's own combat step: a creature swings, taps to attack, and eats the spell before damage, punished for committing to the aggression it was built around. You can also catch one that has tapped itself out for an ability, guard already down. What you cannot do is answer a threat standing back on defense untapped, which keeps this from being a catch-all. It splits the difference between maindeckable removal and dedicated hate, wanting to feel like a beating against aggressive red without becoming a blank in every other matchup. The Alchemy rebalance (the A- prefix) exists because a digital-only tuning knob let designers push the reward against red further than a paper printing would risk.