Heartless Act

The clause that makes this a puzzle rather than a plain kill spell is "with no counters on it." That single restriction ties the two modes together conceptually: the destroy line refuses to answer anything wearing a marker, whether that is a +1/+1 counter, a shield counter, or any indestructible-adjacent stamp, so the same threats that dodge the kill are precisely the ones the counter-scrubbing mode was built to defang. This is a strict modal spell, though, so a single cast picks one job and goes to the graveyard. You cannot strip the counters and then destroy the creature off one copy; you either kill an unadorned threat outright or you peel up to three counters and leave it standing. That structure is the whole tension. The card gates destruction behind a board state rather than behind toughness or mana, which was an uncommon way to price removal when this kind of design first appeared, and it makes the two modes anti-correlated in practice: the more counters a metagame runs, the worse the destroy line reads and the more the removal line matters. A counter-heavy deck is both the reason you keep the second mode in your pocket and the reason the first mode sits dead in hand. Against your own board the counter-removal option flips into maintenance, quietly pulling a stray marker off a creature you would rather not lose. Two modes, one choice, and a restriction that decides which one the situation is even offering.