Ruinous Path

Black's clean kill spell that hits both creatures and planeswalkers, with the trade-off written into its speed rather than its mana. Earlier black removal that reached planeswalkers, like Hero's Downfall, did so at instant speed; this drops that flexibility to sorcery speed, the concession that pays for unconditional destruction of either target type at three mana with no basic-land or life riders attached. The Awaken clause answers a different problem than the topdeck-war exhaustion most one-for-one removal faces, because the base spell still demands a creature or planeswalker to destroy: you cannot fire it into an empty board to make a body. Instead it resolves the late-game tension of a card that only ever trades evenly. When you have a target but already command the board, the full mode lets the same card both kill and develop, animating a land into a 4/4 with haste that can attack immediately. That land becomes a 0/0 Elemental creature, so it dies to the same sweepers any creature does; the payoff is tempo, not resilience. The two modes never compete on a single turn, which is the design point: you buy the cheap removal early and the seven-mana kill-plus-threat once you have spare mana and a target worth the investment. One card covers both the opening exchange and the closing one, with the body it leaves behind serving as the clock rather than a setup play.