Impale

Four mana for unconditional creature destruction is a price tag with a long, mostly unflattering history. Murder set the unconditional benchmark at three mana in double-black; black's genuinely cheap options (Doom Blade, Terror, and their kin) all buy the discount with a condition, a color restriction, or an exempted creature type. Impale offers no such trade: it asks a full four mana and a sorcery-speed restriction for the plain "no strings" kill, which leaves it a generation or two behind the curve the moment it was printed. The card exists because color-pie discipline still occasionally demands a clean, no-clause removal spell at common or near-common rarity, where the design budget cannot stretch to the efficient versions. There is no clever wrinkle here, no graveyard hook, no incidental upside to justify the extra mana: it is the double-black answer that fills a set's kill-spell slot when the sharper ones are reserved for higher rarities. As a piece of removal it does exactly what black removal is supposed to do; as a piece of design it is the baseline against which the more interesting versions earn their text.