Flare of Malice

Every edict from Diabolic Edict to Chainer's Edict priced its clean, target-less removal in mana: you paid four, or two, to make an opponent choose their own casualty, dodging hexproof and protection on the way. This design bolts a second payment method onto that template. When black creatures are already on the battlefield, one of them can settle the whole bill instead of the mana, converting a body you were happy to lose into a free kill spell. That is a tempo swing edicts almost never grant, and it wires directly into decks built to spit out expendable creatures: sacrifice fodder, aristocrat boards with death triggers primed to fire a second time. The pitch demands a nontoken black creature, though, so the token swarms most sacrifice shells lean on can't foot the bill, which quietly narrows the list of qualifying decks. The selection rule is the other wrinkle. Forcing the opponent to shed their highest-mana-value creature or planeswalker, rather than any named permanent, strips the actual threat from behind a wall of chaff and reaches planeswalkers, which most edicts leave alone. Naming nothing is also why it slides past hexproof and protection untouched. The cost of that reach: against a board of only cheap creatures, it clips something small. This is an edict for one kind of deck rather than a generically castable answer, and the build knows exactly which deck it wants.