Phthisis

The price tag is the whole negotiation. Hard-cast, this is a seven-mana removal spell with four black pips, a commitment so steep it functions as a finisher rather than an answer: a creature gone plus life loss scaled to its body. Suspend rewrites that math entirely. For two mana up front you bank the spell and wait five upkeeps, betting that the board will give you a fatter target to point it at and a controller already low enough to feel the drain. That delay is the design tension at the heart of suspend: you trade timing and flexibility for a discount, and the spell that resolves five turns later was never an instant-speed answer in the first place, so the card you suspend is functionally different from the one in your hand. Against a developed board the life-loss clause turns a kill spell into a reach card, a removal-plus-burn hybrid that subtracts a blocker and a chunk of the opponent's life in the same motion. The honest read is that the suspended cost is the real card and the hard-cast line is the emergency button: a removal spell played on layaway, where the patience you invest is repaid in a swing far larger than what a single black pip at sorcery speed could buy outright. It rewards a deck willing to commit early to a payoff it cannot yet see.