Dragon's Presence

The whole card is built on a single restriction: it only hits creatures already committed to combat. That is the tax it pays for the number. Five damage at instant speed for three mana would be aggressively underpriced removal if it worked at will; gate it behind the attacking-or-blocking clause and it becomes a combat instant instead, a rate you buy only in the window a creature has stepped forward to fight. The design lineage here is the conditional burn spell that trades flexibility for cost, the same trade Reprisal and its kin made in white: you cannot proactively clear a blocker before you swing, and you cannot answer a threat sitting quietly on the other side of the board. You wait for the creature to attack you, or you wait for it to block, and then you spend the mana. What you get in return for that patience is a reach most white removal does not have: five is enough to fall a genuine top-end threat, not just the two-and-three-toughness bodies white usually trades with. It rewards holding up mana through a combat step and punishing the swing, which is a very different rhythm than the sorcery-speed sweep white leans on elsewhere. A defensive instrument dressed as burn, priced for the exact moment a fight breaks out.