Sephiroth's Intervention

Four mana to destroy a creature and pad your life total by two, at instant speed and with no restriction on the target: this is the plain-vanilla end of black's kill-spell spectrum, the version with every corner sanded off. Black has spent its whole history paying for unconditional removal in some other currency (life with Dark Ritual-era spells, a card with Diabolic Edict's blind sacrifice, a body left behind with Doom Blade's demons-and-artifacts loophole). This one asks nothing beyond the mana. The two life is not a downside offset but a small upside, the kind of incidental buffer that matters against an aggressive clock or a shock-land opponent, and it costs the card nothing to include because the rate was already set by the four-mana price. That price is the whole balancing story: at three mana or below, unconditional instant-speed destruction with lifegain attached would be a genuine constraint on what creatures can safely be printed; at four, it sits comfortably above the efficient answers and below the ones that generate real value. It is the removal spell you reach for when you want no clauses to read and no fine print to misplay, and the design's honesty is exactly its purpose: a clean, castable, forgiving answer that trades elegance of effect for elegance of rate.