Murder

Three mana, two of them black, to destroy any creature with no caveat attached: that simplicity is the entire point. For most of Magic's history, unconditional creature removal carried a tax. Terror could not touch black or artifact creatures; Doom Blade spared black; Go for the Throat left artifacts alone. This one asks only that you pay an extra generic mana and, in exchange, drops every rider. It is the rate-versus-flexibility trade laid bare: a half-step worse on cost than the two-mana kill spells, but with nothing to read on the target's color or type, nothing to play around, nothing for an opponent to dodge by casting the right threat. The name is the design thesis. Black's removal usually wraps its effect in flourish (terror, assassination, a snuffing out, a fatal push), so the dramatic verbs do a lot of work disguising what is really just a destroy clause. Here the verb is stripped to a single blunt word that matches a single blunt line of text, refusing to spend any complexity budget on either flavor or conditions. It marks the floor of what clean removal looks like when restriction is the only lever a designer declines to pull, and it became the template that later instants either undercut on cost by reintroducing a caveat, or matched while trying to do something extra with the corpse.