Death's Caress

The price tag is the whole tension. Five mana for destroy-target-creature is a slow, expensive rate for a color that has bought unconditional kills at two or three mana for most of its history, so the card has to justify the gap with its rider. The clause it leans on is a tribal lottery: life gain equal to toughness, but only when the dead creature is a Human. That ties the upside to a creature type rather than to power or board state, which makes it volatile by design. Against a goblin, a dragon, anything not Human, you have paid a steep premium for a vanilla kill. Against a beefy Human blocker you erase a threat and bank a real life swing in the same motion, which is exactly the cushion a black deck wants when it is the one under pressure. The flavor logic is doing the heavy lifting here: in a world overrun by the undead, the living defenders are the ones worth draining, and the clause reads as a flavor justification dressed up as a tribal kicker. As a piece of removal it is honest about what it costs and what it returns: too clunky to anchor a serious answer suite, functional in any deck that needs a guaranteed kill and does not mind paying late for it, with a conditional payout that arrives only when the board happens to oblige.