Parting Thoughts

Most unconditional removal asks nothing of the target beyond its existence; this one reads the target's history off its counters. The destroy clause resolves cleanly by itself, and the rider turns the spell into a meter on what an opponent has invested: kill a freshly cast creature and you get a plain kill spell, kill something heaped with +1/+1 counters and you cash those out as cards, paying for them in life rather than mana. That dual scaling is the load-bearing part of the design. Drawing equal to the counters is the reward; losing equal to the counters is the bill that keeps the spell from being a free windmill against the kind of go-tall threat that snowballs into a single oversized creature. The bigger the monster you point it at, the bigger the refund and the bigger the cost, which ties the payoff to the board state rather than to the card's own mana value. It rewards killing the creature an opponent has spent the most resources growing, exactly the target a plain removal spell already wants, and hands you the modular or proliferated investment as compensation. The fixed-cost-but-variable-payoff shape stops it from collapsing into either a dead card against an empty counter-pile or an oppressive one against a swollen threat: against a vanilla beater it is just removal, and against a counter-stacked giant it is removal that draws its own replacement and then some.