Ghastly Demise

A single black mana to destroy a creature is a price no removal spell gets to charge without a catch, and here the catch is a counting exercise: the kill caps out at the target's toughness, but that ceiling rises one card at a time with everything in your own graveyard. With an empty bin the spell is dead in hand; two or three cards deep it picks off mana dorks and weenies; once the yard is stocked it answers nearly anything short of the truly enormous. This is not a binary Threshold trigger that flips on at seven cards; it is a smooth, card-by-card slope, where the bin functions as a number you read off the top of your discard and self-mill. The more you have lost, the deadlier the spell becomes. That conceit, the graveyard as a resource rather than a dead zone, runs through a whole lineage of early designs that asked you to fill your own yard on purpose. The nonblack clause is a quiet flavor-and-balance touch (black does not slay its own kind), which leaves the spell blind to mirror-color creatures rather than to any size bracket. The bargain is the point: enormous when your deck is doing its job, a blank when it is not, a removal spell whose lethality you build toward across a game rather than hold at a fixed rate.