Puncturing Light

The condition is the entire engineering problem. White destroys the target outright, but only after the creature has committed to combat and only if its power stays at three or below: a double gate that prices the spell in patience rather than mana. You cannot point it at an untapped threat parked on defense, and you cannot use it on the fat finisher that white removal has always struggled against. The spell does nothing until the opponent makes an attack-or-block decision, and then it only reaches the smaller end of the board. The reward for accepting those terms is that power three or less still covers a large share of the creatures that actually swing or trade, so within combat the answer is broad even though it is narrow everywhere else. Choosing "destroy" as the verb carries its own costs: indestructible creatures shrug it off entirely, and unlike exile-based answers it leaves graveyard-recursion engines fully intact. White has always written its cheap kill spells this way, as reactive combat instants that ask you to time the answer to a phase rather than fire it on your own turn. The lesson is structural to the color's design history: white is rarely handed clean, proactive removal, so its bargain-rate answers get reshaped into conditional ones that demand the opponent overextend first.