Orbital Plunge

Removal that pays a rebate for overkill is a rare shape, and this is a clean expression of it. Six damage is more than almost any creature it targets needs, which is the point: the surplus becomes a currency. Where most premium red removal simply wastes any damage past lethal, this design banks that excess into a Lander, folding a fixing-and-ramp payoff into a spell whose primary job is killing something. The token is a slow, board-agnostic engine (crack it later for a tapped basic), so a kill spent on the turn it was needed anyway leaves behind a small structural advantage for the long game. The tension the designers had to resolve is that a spell doing two jobs at once wants to come in undercosted, so the payoff is gated: the Lander appears only when the six damage overshoots the creature's toughness at all. That gate is a binary switch, not a sliding scale. One point of excess against a five-toughness threat earns the same single Lander as five points against a one-toughness creature, so there is no incentive to hunt for the smallest possible target; the kill simply needs to land with room to spare, which six damage almost always provides. The result reads less like a burn spell with a rider and more like a fixing card that happens to murder something, an unusual place for four mana of red to sit.