Agonizing Demise

Black's targeted destruction has always paid for its power with a color exemption, and the base mode here is the era's standard tax: kill any nonblack creature, regeneration shut off, for four mana. What separates this from a plain Terror variant is the kicker, and the kicker is built around an unusually honest incentive. Splash a single red source and the same spell cashes the dying creature's power in as a direct hit to its controller. Because the bonus scales with the target's power, the math lines up precisely with how you want to use it: you most want to kick this against exactly the heavy threats that make the burn worth paying for. The damage going to the player rather than the board is the wrinkle that gives the kicked mode reach. A kicked cast against a fat attacker removes the threat and burns its controller in the same beat, so removal occasionally moonlights as a finisher in a stalled race. The nonblack restriction remains the structural hedge that priced black's clean answers throughout this period, keeping the spell from being a universal solve, and the red splash asks little of a two-color deck already running the source. The result is a tidy application of the multicolor kicker philosophy to removal: a fair black spell at its floor, a tempo-and-reach play at its ceiling, with the same card serving both modes.