Overkill

Ordinary toughness reduction has always had an escape hatch: a -X/-X spell can be answered by a pump or simply a body big enough to stack above the number. Applying a -9999 toughness modifier all but slams that door shut. Almost nothing the game can produce climbs back over the figure, so state-based actions bury the creature regardless of what sat on top of it, and the routing is what does the work. Because the card never says "destroy," indestructible is irrelevant; because the creature is put into the graveyard as a state-based action rather than destroyed, regeneration does not fire either. That is what the comic number is paying for: an old effect scaled past every escape hatch that usually costs black removal its edicts, life payments, and "nonblack" clauses, all while reading exactly like the toughness removal black has always trafficked in. At instant speed it doubles as a lethal combat trick, turning a blocker or attacker into a corpse before damage is assigned. The cost here is not restriction but legibility: it remains ordinary targeted removal, subject to the same hexproof and the same in-response tricks that answer any point-and-kill spell. What makes it worth remarking on is the packaging. An effect this clean almost never needs a number this loud, and dressing routine toughness removal in absurd overkill is precisely the design conceit; the mechanics are pure black, the presentation is the flourish.