Breathe Your Last

Unconditional removal at instant speed has always paid a premium: it hits creatures and planeswalkers alike, it dodges nothing, and it costs more than the color-limited or exile-clause answers that surround it. The life gain here is a rider, not a reason: one life per color of the destroyed permanent means a mono-colored threat pays back a single point, while a multicolor bomb or gold-bordered planeswalker returns more, scaling the incidental gain to the size of the problem you were already solving. That is the tidy part of the design. A colorless target (an artifact creature, an Eldrazi) gives back nothing at all, which is the small tax the card accepts for being genuinely universal. Black has long had to choose between clean removal and cheap removal, between hitting anything and hitting only creatures, and this sits on the expensive-but-unconditional end of that spectrum where the payment for hitting any creature or planeswalker is the third mana rather than a further target restriction or a downside. The gained life rarely swings a game on its own, but against an aggressive board it buys back a chunk of what the threat had already cost you, and against a top-end planeswalker it softens the tempo hit of trading three mana for a card that cost more. A workmanlike answer, priced honestly for what it does.