Fate of the Sun-Cryst

White has always struggled to remove a creature outright at a fair price: unconditional destruction has historically been red-and-black's job, and white paid for its answers with hard restrictions like "attacking or blocking" or a converted-mana-cost floor. This design finds a cleaner lever. At full cost, five mana to destroy any nonland permanent is deliberately steep, a rate nobody wants to pay. But the discount rewrites the math the moment a creature taps, and creatures tap for the most ordinary reasons in the game: to attack, to crew, to activate. The result reads combat and board state rather than answering threats proactively. The interesting consequence is the window it forces open. You hold this at instant speed and let the opponent commit, then destroy the thing they just tapped for three mana instead of five, having spent nothing while it sat idle. The discount is welded to the target, though: it applies only when you point the spell at a tapped creature, so the cheap version and the tapped creature are the same choice. You never get the three-mana rate against a planeswalker, or against any noncreature artifact or enchantment. Against untapped threats it is a bad card on purpose; against a board that has had to act, it is priced like a premium answer. The conditional cost does the work a hard restriction usually does, but the destroy clause stays universal: the tapped-creature clause governs the price you pay, not the range of what full-cost mode can hit.