Dark Temper

The conditional is the whole design: the same instant is a middling burn spell or a clean kill depending on a single deckbuilding choice. Two damage to a creature for three mana is an unremarkable rate, the kind of removal that bounces off anything with toughness to spare. Control one black permanent, though, and the spell rewrites itself into unconditional destruction that ignores toughness entirely. The catch worth knowing is what qualifies: lands are colorless by default, so a Swamp or an untapped dual does nothing for you here. You need an actual black permanent on the battlefield (a black creature, a black artifact, a black enchantment) to flip the spell into kill mode. This is the multicolor-incentive school at its most legible: the card pays you for committing to a second color, and the payment is large enough to matter without forcing a full splash. The crucial wrinkle is when the payment gets verified. The destroy clause is checked on resolution, not on cast, so the board state that counts is the one that exists when the spell actually resolves. That leaves a real window for disruption: an opponent who picks off your only black permanent in response shrinks the spell back to two damage before it ever resolves, and the order in which you commit black permanents matters for exactly that reason. The destroy mode is still ordinary destruction, mind: a regeneration shield turns it right back off.