Grim Bounty
Unconditional removal that hits both creatures and planeswalkers has always carried a premium, and the modern design fix has been to charge for that flexibility with mana rather than a restriction on the target. Four mana buys the entire clause here: destroy target creature or planeswalker, no toughness cap, no nonblack exclusion, no edict-style tax that lets the opponent choose the victim. Where cheaper single-black removal like Doom Blade or Ultimate Price bought its efficiency by narrowing what it could kill, this spends the extra mana on reach, then softens the sting with a Treasure. The token is where the real balancing happens. A four-mana sorcery-speed answer is a tempo loss on its face; the Treasure hands one of those four mana back the following turn, or fixes a splash color, or feeds an artifact payoff. Effectively the spell costs three mana spread across two turns, which is the only way a removal spell this expensive avoids reading as a pure concession to your own development. Universal removal plus incidental ramp and fixing is a repeatable template, and it reflects a broadly held design instinct: black's premium removal should cost real mana, and the compensation should smooth the very manabase the spell strains.



