Assassin's Ink

Unconditional creature-and-planeswalker removal at instant speed sits in black's four-mana neighborhood by default, and this holds to that baseline while offering a discount ladder off the two permanent types black most often shares a deck with. Control an artifact and it drops a mana; control an enchantment too and it drops another, bottoming out at for a spell that answers anything with a loyalty counter or a toughness. The whole design lives in that cost-reduction clause, and the interesting part is what it demands rather than what it gives: the reduction is not a bonus you stumble into but a deckbuilding commitment you pay upfront, rewarding a shell already dense in artifacts and enchantments and doing nothing extra for one that runs neither. That makes it a payoff for a specific board texture rather than a generically efficient answer, and it belongs to a long line of black kill spells that trade rate for a condition. Where earlier designs asked for a life payment, a graveyard, or a discarded card, this one asks for permanent-type density, a tax that is trivial to satisfy in the abstract and free once the deck is built for it. The trick is that both conditions want the same kind of controlling, permanent-heavy midrange shell that black-based decks already gravitate toward, so the ceiling and the floor tend to arrive together.