Burn the Impure

The trick is that the hate is conditional but the floor is not. Three damage to a creature is a solid answer on its own, the kind of clean removal a red deck wants against most of what it is pointing at; the rider that throws the same three at an infect creature's controller only fires when the target carries the keyword. Most keyword-hate cards of that era were built the other way around: their value lived entirely in the matchup they policed, leaving you holding a dead spell whenever the hated thing was absent. This one front-loads the ordinary work and treats the punishment as a bonus collected when the board cooperates. The extra three at the player matters more than its size suggests because infect decks run on a poison clock rather than a damage clock, so they tend to dump life aggressively, trusting they will never be killed by conventional burn. Burn the Impure rewrites that assumption: kill the threat, then chip into the life total the infect player was treating as expendable, narrowing the window before they have to start respecting fire again. The flavor reading is unusually tidy for a removal spell. Infect is corruption made mechanical, and the card answers corruption by burning the creature carrying it and scorching the hand that sent it, the punishment scaled to the crime rather than applied flatly.