Final Payment

Two mana for unconditional creature destruction is a rate most colors never see, and the additional cost is the whole ledger. You can pay five life, which turns this into premium removal any deck comfortable bleeding itself will happily run; or you can feed a spent creature or a dying enchantment into the kill spell, which is where it stops being clean removal and starts being an engine. That second mode is a sacrifice outlet folded into a destroy effect, so a token, a persist creature about to leave anyway, or an enchantment whose value has already resolved becomes fuel rather than a permanent that dies for nothing. The tension is that the two payments answer opposite deck needs. Life is the resource an aggressive, low-to-the-ground list has to spare; a creature or enchantment is the resource a grindy aristocrats build wants to convert into a death trigger and a removed threat rather than a card wasted. Because it is an instant, the sacrifice half can be held as a response: an exile-based removal spell or a bounce effect aimed at your creature gets pre-empted by cashing that creature in for a kill before it can be answered. The result reads as a compact statement of the guild ethos it comes from: everything on the board has a price, and Final Payment makes you name it at the moment of casting.