Attempted Murder
Removal that treats the kill as a probability distribution rather than a promise. Every point of X is a die, and each die swings between two permanent outcomes: an even face rots your target with a pair of shrinking counters, an odd face hands you a 1/2 flier named Storm Crow, resurrecting the community's oldest shorthand for the least threatening creature ever printed. It is a genuine two-sided gamble, because both results scale off the same investment with no way to weight the coin. Pour more mana into X and you buy more removal, but you widen the flock you may not want in exactly equal measure; larger X only stretches the spread on both ends. Roll hot and a creature dissolves for a bargain; roll cold and you have spent black mana assembling a wing of history's most maligned bird. Because the counters and the tokens both stick, the distance between your best case and worst case is enormous, and you set that distance yourself by choosing X. The Storm Crow payoff is the joke buried in the spell: it converts every whiff into a punchline you told on purpose, and turns a removal card that might not kill anything into one that never entirely fails.
