Gallows at Willow Hill

Built like a town's communal defense rather than a single removal effect, this asks for a board state before it asks for mana: not just three to activate, but three untapped Humans to tap as part of the cost. That body requirement is the toll. A repeatable, unconditional creature-kill is a powerful thing, and the design buys it back by demanding a developed, tribally-coherent battlefield, then charging those bodies' time on the activation instead of in combat. The Spirit token handed to the victim's controller is the second softener that keeps the effect from reading as a clean one-for-one: every execution leaves a flying blocker behind, so the engine grinds slowly and never swings tempo as hard as the kill rate suggests. It rewards the kind of go-wide Human deck that already has more attackers than it can profitably swing in any given combat step, converting a board surplus into a recurring answer for the one creature that surplus cannot attack into. The gallows-and-villagers flavor is evocative, but the mechanical identity is the part worth studying: a tap-engine removal artifact that turns tribal width into removal density, gated behind a body count most decks cannot sustain.