Deadshot

Removal that turns the board into the weapon: rather than supplying its own damage, this spell conscripts a creature into firing its power at another creature. The targeting is the whole trick, because the oracle text reads "target creature" rather than "target creature you control." Either half of the line can sit on either side of the table, so you can point an opponent's high-power attacker at one of their own creatures and resolve a creature kill without committing any of your own board to the exchange. The cost lives in the tap clause, which doubles as the price: the gun-creature taps as part of resolution, so on your own turn you are trading its untapped state (and its attack for that turn) for the shot. Note what tapping does not buy you on a sorcery: an opponent's creature you tap simply untaps on their turn, so this prevents nothing on their turn. The rest of the line is friction. It is sorcery-speed at four mana, it does nothing when no creature has enough power to matter, and its ceiling is borrowed entirely from beef already on the battlefield. The lineage is the damage-redirection and "fight"-style design space red and green would later render with cleaner cards: this is an early, fiddlier ancestor that asks the battlefield to provide the firepower and budgets the cost into the tap on top of the mana. A developed board makes it sing; a barren one makes it a dead card.