Eyes of the Beholder

Six mana for a -11/-11 is a rate you never pay when the format is playing fair, and that is exactly the point of this design. Toughness reduction is black's oblique answer to the creatures a destroy spell cannot touch: an indestructible body still has to survive its own math, and stripping every point of its size folds it where "destroy target creature" bounces off. The number here is not chosen for elegance; it is a ceiling, large enough to erase almost anything a battlefield can present while pricing the card so it functions as an instant-speed catch-all rather than efficient spot removal. That instant timing is the load-bearing piece. It lets the spell wait for a blocker to be declared, for a pumped attacker to commit, for the exact stack window where reducing toughness to nothing beats a destroy effect the target ignores. It also matters that the creature dies from state-based check rather than being destroyed, so death-triggers and "dies" payoffs still fire; that is a genuine difference from exile, which suppresses them. What it does not do is dodge protection: because it targets, hexproof and ward wall it off exactly as they wall off any removal. Black has cycled through this toughness-drain template across many eras, from broad negative-pump sweepers down to trimmed versions that only shave a few points; this one sits at the fat, expensive end, built for tables where creatures routinely outgrow anything cheaper.