Go for the Throat

The price black pays for premium creature removal has always been a clause, and this card's clause is the cleanest version anyone has shipped: it cannot touch artifact creatures. That single carve-out is the entire balancing act. Doom Blade refused black creatures; Terror spared anything black or an artifact; Murder charged a third mana to answer everything. This one trims the exception down to a single card type and asks for nothing else: no life payment, no exile downside, no sorcery-speed handcuff, no regeneration clause. The result is two mana at instant speed that kills nearly every creature in the game, with a blind spot narrow enough that most decks never feel it. The artifact restriction is not arbitrary, either; it reads as a deliberate gesture toward letting artifact-creature strategies have a fighting chance against the most flexible color in the kill-spell business, a designed-in weakness rather than a tax. The exception almost never comes up in practice, so the rate plays as unconditional removal even though it technically is not. It became the template later "destroy target creature" instants get measured against, and the reason designers keep bolting on new clauses (a counter, an exile rider, a tribe lock) is that this baseline left them so little room to undercut on raw efficiency.