Reach of Shadows

Black has always bought certainty with mana: where white and blue lean on conditions, black pays full price for a destroy effect that asks nothing about the target's toughness, tribe, or board position. At five mana this sits a notch above the classic four-mana kill spells, and the extra pip buys you nothing the rate doesn't already give; it is the price of printing a nearly unconditional destroy at common, where the power budget runs lean. The lone restriction hides in the target line: the creature has to be one or more colors. That clause carves out a real hole rather than a downside you'd feel every game, because the overwhelming majority of creatures it points at are colored anyway. What it cannot touch are the colorless bodies (artifact creatures and the Eldrazi that sit outside black's reach), an exclusion that preserves a category of threat the color is not meant to answer outright. Beyond that carve-out the design is defined by its plainness: instant-speed, self-contained, slotting into any black deck without demanding support. Being an ordinary targeted destroy, it runs into the usual escape hatches: regeneration shields and indestructibility let the target survive even as the spell resolves, and anything that makes the target illegal in response (protection or hexproof granted after it is cast) leaves the spell to fizzle. It is the floor of black removal, the version a design reaches for when it needs a serviceable kill spell at common without pushing removal density past what the set intends.