Mythos of Nethroi

The whole cycle runs on the same conditional split: cast the spell in its home color for a modest floor, or pay two off-color pips to unlock the ceiling. The floor here is instant-speed creature destruction, a rate black is happy to run on its own; the ceiling is unconditional removal of any nonland permanent. The clever part is where the extra cost comes from: not more mana stacked on top, but green and white in the pool, colors that sit outside black's identity entirely. The full effect is a reward for the color spread rather than a tax any deck can pay, which means the mode you get is decided by what your manabase can actually produce. A mono-black shell buys clean creature kill and never sees the second half; it accepts that the spell is inert against a board with no creature to point it at, the way any single-mode removal spell would be. An Abzan deck with green and white online can instead aim it at a planeswalker, an enchantment, or a problematic artifact. What makes the design legible is that you know at cast time exactly which mode your mana affords, with none of the guesswork that kicker or escalate can introduce; the spell scales its answer to how far you have committed across the color pie.