Infernal Grasp

Black had spent decades solving the problem of unconditional removal by attaching conditions: Doom Blade dodged black creatures, Ultimate Price wanted a single color, Go for the Throat left artifacts alive, and Hero's Downfall paid extra to hit anything. The design tension has always been that black is the color that can kill anything, but the color tax says it should never do so cheaply and cleanly at once. This card resolves that tension by moving the price off the target restriction and onto the caster's life total. Two mana, no exceptions on what dies, and the cost is paid out of your own resources rather than the board's. That trade reframes what the removal is for: against aggressive decks the two life is a real dent, and against control mirrors it is nothing, so the card's efficiency scales inversely with how much you can afford it. The life loss also plays into black's broader economy, where paying life is a lever rather than a penalty; a deck already draining or paying its way through the game absorbs the cost as noise. It is the modern template for "kill anything, no clauses," and the reason later designers have felt free to print similarly unconditional black removal at two mana as long as there is a matching self-inflicted wound to hold the rate in check.