Price of Fame

Most unconditional kill spells charge a flat tax for the privilege of hitting anything; this one inverts the logic by discounting itself against the targets that usually demand the most respect. Pay four mana to destroy a creature with surveil 2 attached and the rate is unremarkable, a clunky catch-all that fills out a control shell. But aim it at a legendary creature and the cost collapses to two mana, turning a slow answer into one of the cheapest ways in black to remove a commander, a walking bomb, or any of the singular threats that anchor a deck's plan. The design reads the metagame for you: the more a format leans on build-around legends, the better the spell gets, without ever needing a separate mode or a trigger to draw the distinction. Surveil 2 is the quiet glue, smoothing the next few draws whether you cast it at full price or as a two-mana assassination, so the card never feels purely reactive even when it trades down on rate. What it represents is a pricing model few removal spells use: cost keyed to the value of the target rather than a single flat number for everything. The legendary clause is a clean expression of that idea, cheap precisely when the target matters most and fairly priced when it does not.