Death Pulse

Most cycling cards charge a small premium for the option to ditch them later; here the discard mode is grafted onto a removal spell that already earns its slot. Cast for full, the -4/-4 kills nearly anything a fair deck fields at parity or better. The cycling clause is where the design earns its second life: when there is no target worth a hard answer, you pay close to the spell's own cost to draw fresh and still shave a point off something across the table. That -1/-1 rider looks negligible, but it separates a cycle into dead air from a cycle into a tempo swing, finishing a flier already chipped in combat or killing the token a single point was always going to handle. The structure resolves an old tension in interactive black: removal that draws dead against the wrong board. This card never has a dead copy, only a less impactful one, and the two modes share enough of a price that the choice stays genuinely live every game. It is a quiet template, the kind that gets borrowed: a heavy-handed effect bolted to a discount escape hatch that still does a fraction of the original job on the way out.