Reave Soul

The power-3-or-less rider is the entire economy of this card: two mana to destroy a creature outright is a rate black has historically paid for elsewhere in life, in card disadvantage, or in tempo. Capping the target's power is the cleaner toll. It walks past most of what black removal struggles to kill at this price, ignoring toughness and color entirely, while leaving the genuinely threatening end of the curve untouched: the haymaker creatures, the pumped attackers, the fatties the early game was always going to lose to anyway. Being a destroy effect, it still bounces off anything with indestructible or protection from black, the same way any unconditional kill does; the power cap narrows what it can legally target, not how the destruction resolves once it has a target. The result is a removal spell built to clear blockers and early threats, exactly where black's small creatures and aggressive bodies most want a clean kill before combat math sets in. It is a deliberately humbler design than the open-ended destroy-target-creature spells black periodically earns when a format can afford them; the power restriction is what lets the rate stay this aggressive without the card becoming a catch-all. Set it against the toughness-gated and damage-based removal red and white lean on: this hits a different slice of the board, and the slice it hits is precisely the one a cheap black deck most needs gone.