Plaguebearer

A repeatable removal engine wearing a 1/1 body, built around the steepest mana scaling the design team could bolt onto a permanent: the cost means killing anything with mana value three runs you seven mana, and the curve gets uglier from there. The design logic is a tax on efficiency rather than a hard restriction. Plaguebearer can theoretically destroy any nonblack creature, but the doubled X clause makes it a luxury executioner, priced so that you only ever spend the mana on threats that genuinely matter. That same scaling makes it a clean answer to the bottom of the curve: zero-cost creatures and the various token bodies it can reach fall to a cheap activation, which lets the card mop up small nonblack creatures while the doubled cost keeps the high end honest. The targeting line is the other half of the build: nonblack only, the standard mono-black design tell that keeps the engine from being a generic removal staple and ties its weakness to its own color. What the card represents is the late-90s answer to the recurring-removal problem before activated abilities were tightly costed: hand the player a permanent that kills anything, then make the price escalate fast enough that "anything" is mostly aspirational. The body invites a chump block or a sacrifice, but the destroy clause is the reason it ever sees a table.