Kill! Maim! Burn!
Modal spells that let you take every mode at once trade elegance for splash: the choose-one-or-more clause turns a decision into an accumulation, and the price you pay is a rate that never looks efficient at any single mode. Five mana for a single creature kill is a bad rate; five mana for a creature, an artifact, and three points to the dome is exactly what the card is built to do, and it only pays off when the board hands you two or three targets worth answering. That is the tension it resolves: it wants a full battlefield and an opponent already under pressure, and it is dead weight against an empty one. What separates it from the artifact-or-creature two-mode removal that came before is the reach clause. Destroying a permanent is a reaction; three damage to a player is initiative, and stapling the two together means a single card can clear a blocker and close the gap in the same instant-speed window. The design leans hard into the greedy-modal school of Blast from the Past and its kin, where the reward for building around plentiful targets is doing three jobs on one card. It reads as a haymaker because it is one: an instant that punishes an opponent for over-committing, and does nothing to punish one who has not.
