Cruel Ultimatum

The seven-pip color requirement, two of each blue and red and three black, is the whole point: this is a Grixis card that cannot be splashed, only built around, and the reward for committing to that manabase is a one-card swing across every resource the game tracks. Count the axes it touches in a single resolution: the board (a creature gone), the hand (three cards stripped, three drawn), life (a ten-point swing), and the graveyard (a creature recurred). Most expensive sorceries do one or two of those decisively; this one moves all of them at once, which is why it sits in a small class of named spells that function as a turn rather than a card. The design lineage is the cycle of seven-mana, tricolor "Ultimatum" sorceries built to anchor the three-color decks of their era, each color-trio getting a marquee payoff for paying the steep pip cost. The deliberate weakness is that the opponent chooses which creature to sacrifice, so it never functions as targeted removal of a specific threat; it strips a body, not the body you fear most. That choice is the tax on an otherwise total effect: resolve it, and you have rebuilt your position from nothing while leaving the opponent three cards lighter and on a fragile board. The friction is that resolving a seven-mana sorcery at all is a tall ask, and a single counterspell turns the most lopsided swing in the game into the worst tempo loss in it.