Long Goodbye

A generation of two- and three-drops arrived wearing ward, hexproof-adjacent taxes, or protection riders that turned every removal spell into a negotiation, and this one refuses to negotiate. Cheap black removal has never had trouble killing things; the problem is killing things that fight back on the way down. The spell that ignores ward is precisely the spell a ward creature cannot buy its way out of, and the parenthetical naming ward directly is unusually blunt about what it exists to punish. The mana-value ceiling is the price for that reach. Restricting it to three-or-less keeps it away from the fatties and the marquee planeswalkers, which is exactly where the give-and-take lives: it is a scalpel for the low end of the curve, the band where the widest, wardiest, most annoying threats tend to sit. Structurally it does the work that Dismember does for cost-flexibility, except the flexibility here is against interaction rather than mana. It kills planeswalkers too, which quietly makes it a clean answer to the cheap loyalty engines that would otherwise shrug off sorcery-speed removal by ticking once and protecting themselves. A precise, deliberately capped removal spell whose entire premise is that the target does not get a say.