Aerial Assault

The tapped-creature clause turns this into a punish rather than a pre-emptive strike: it can only answer a creature that has already committed to attacking or spent itself on an ability, never a threat sitting untapped and defended. That restriction is the price you pay for the low cost and the lifegain rider, and it points the card at an aggressive-flyers plan rather than a control shell. The second line scales with a board full of flyers, rewarding a deck that has already gone wide in the air: they attack back on the ground, and you clear a tapped attacker while padding a life total the beatdown plan has been spending down. It is a conditional Pacifism-tier answer dressed as tempo, and the two halves want the same board state. Where an unconditional kill spell wants to be flexible, this one wants a specific texture of game: creatures tapped from combat and a sky full of your own attackers. That focus is the design's honesty. It is not trying to be a catch-all removal spell; it is trying to be the removal a white flyers deck actually wants, one that trades cleanly in the exact position that archetype produces on its own.