Gloomlance

Black removal that destroys anything has always been the genre's bread and butter, so a clean kill spell that runs to five mana is asking you to pay for something extra. That something is a rider pointed in a deliberate direction: against green or white targets, killing the creature also strips a card from the opponent's hand. The conditional discard accounts for the upcharge over the leaner cost a generic destroy effect commands; it is a sideboard-grade hate clause folded into a maindeck card, built for an era when set-level color tensions were drawn explicitly and black was cast as the predator of green's fat bodies and white's go-wide boards. Against blue or red, it is overcosted spot removal and nothing more; against the right target, it is a two-for-one that punishes a creature for being the color it is. The asymmetry is the design: rather than scaling its power by what you cast it on generically, it scales by the color of the creature you destroy, which makes it a piece of intentional color-pie warfare instead of a generically efficient answer. That narrowness is exactly why it never escaped its niche, but it remains a clean example of removal engineered to be a worse Doom Blade most of the time and a backbreaker some of the time.