Reduce to Ashes

Five mana for five damage is a deliberately unhurried rate, and the exile rider is what pays for the price: pure damage-based removal at this cost would embarrass itself. Most creature kill spells leave a graveyard exploitable, and the threats that punish burn are the ones worth more dead than alive: Undying creatures that return larger, Persist threats that come back to trigger again, the recursive value engines that treat death as a resource. This closes that loophole by replacing the death event entirely. If the creature would die this turn, from this spell or anything else, it gets exiled instead, so its death triggers never fire and nothing reanimates it later. The boundary is worth being precise about, because the clause only works on creatures that actually die: a regenerated creature is never destroyed, so it never "would die" and slips the rider, and an indestructible creature shrugs off the damage outright. What it catches is the second-life death-trigger threat, not the creature that dodges death by another rule. The permanence is the honest half of the bargain: red rarely gets to exile a creature outright, and that privilege comes at full freight. It is the unglamorous workhorse version of the effect, asking nothing of your graveyard and nothing of your board, only the mana to spend and a creature worth spending it on.