Bloodchief's Thirst

The trick this design pulls is charging you twice for the same word. For a single black mana, it kills anything with mana value two or less, which is exactly the range where the game's most abusive early plays live: mana dorks, one-drop hatebears, the two-mana creatures that decide whether an aggressive draw connects. That's already one of the tightest early-turn answers black has ever printed. The kicker then buys off the entire restriction: pay the extra cost and it becomes unconditional removal that hits any creature or planeswalker regardless of size. The elegance is that the small mode and the big mode are the same card, so a hand keeps both a proactive turn-one play and a late-game answer to a bomb in one slot without the usual cost of running dead cards. Sorcery speed does the balancing work: it can't ambush an attacker mid-combat or catch a flash creature the turn it lands, so the interaction happens on your own turn, on your own terms. This is the modern refinement of a long line of cheap black kill spells, the ones that traded flexibility for rate. Here the trade is inverted: the rate is elite when you're proactive, and the flexibility is available for a premium once the board has grown past the cheap-target clause.