Hideous End

The two life is the offensive rider, not the price: this kills almost any creature at instant speed, and then puts the opponent two further down the clock for nothing extra. Black has always made deals with life, but the older template aimed the cost at the caster: Sign in Blood, the painlands, the various self-bleeding rituals. Here the loss lands on the dying creature's controller instead, which folds a small reach effect into a hard answer. The nonblack clause is the genuine constraint, the wrinkle every "destroy target creature" in black has carried since the earliest sets: black cannot be allowed to answer its own threats cleanly, so its removal leaves a hole exactly the size of its own color. In practice that hole is narrow, and the spell behaves as a clean three-mana kill with two points of incidental damage stapled to the back end. That combination, hard removal plus life loss pointed at the opponent, is what separates this from a pure Murder variant: it does not just stop a creature, it pushes the race in the same breath. Note the life loss is one-directional; the caster gains nothing, so this is reach rather than a swing. The design lesson it carries is how cheaply black can buy reach when the effect rides along on something the deck was going to cast anyway.