Dragon's Prey

Unconditional creature removal at three mana is a rate black has lived at comfortably for years, Murder being the cleanest reference point. The tax is the whole design conceit here: destroy anything at the standard price, but pay two more to point it at a Dragon. That inversion is worth sitting with. Most cards that care about a creature type reward you for hitting it (extra value, a bonus trigger); this one penalizes you, structurally, for aiming at the thing the setting cares most about. Against everything that is not a Dragon, it is a clean, cheap kill spell. Against a Dragon, it swells to five and reads as a deliberate concession: yes, you can still answer the board's largest threat, but the surcharge acknowledges that Dragons are meant to be hard to kill on the cheap. It is a resiliency valve dressed as removal, letting a plane full of enormous fliers exist without turning the format's most reliable black instant into a wholesale off-switch for all of them. The friction lives entirely in the targeting decision, which keeps the card honest in exactly one matchup while leaving it fully unconditional everywhere else. By rate it is unremarkable; as a statement about which creatures a format wants shielded from black's most dependable answer, it is precise.