Killing Glare

Black's scaling removal usually pays for reach in one of two ways: a fixed price that refuses certain targets (the indestructible, the regenerating, the too-large) or an extra cost to ignore those clauses. This inverts the arrangement by tying its ceiling to power and letting you buy past it with raw mana. The price reads off how hard a creature hits: a one-power threat dies for two mana, a five-power haymaker demands six, and the bigger the body's attack stat, the more the spell asks. The corollary is the part that defines where the card actually wants to live. Because the test is power and not toughness, the smallest-hitting things are the cheapest to remove, not the costliest: a defender-shaped wall or a value engine with zero power falls for a single mana (X equals zero satisfies "power X or less"), and a token or mana dork goes down nearly as cheaply. That makes it sharpest against exactly what black's -X/-X removal stumbles on. A spell like Disfigure or Languish has to shave toughness, so a high-toughness blocker or a beefy engine body survives the subtraction; Killing Glare ignores toughness entirely and cares only whether the thing swings hard. Against a genuine haymaker the math runs the wrong way, asking a full turn's worth of mana to kill what cheaper unconditional removal handles flat. What sits outside its window is reach, not category: a creature is never too small to die here, only too hard-hitting to die affordably.