Severed Strands

The sacrifice clause pulls double duty, and that overlap is what separates this from a plain kill spell. Black has always priced unconditional destruction with a cost somewhere: life, discard, a creature. Here you feed it a creature you control, but the spell refunds part of the transaction as life equal to that creature's toughness, inverting the usual sacrifice math. A token, a body whose enters-the-battlefield trigger has already fired, or a blocker that has outlived its shift becomes removal fuel that pays a dividend on the way out. The reward scales with toughness rather than power, which nudges you toward sacrificing the durable wall over the fragile attacker when the numbers are close. Being a sorcery denies the combat-trick blowout: you cannot chump a creature mid-block and then destroy the attacker that killed it, because the whole sequence happens on your main phase with an empty stack. That timing restriction is what keeps the package fair, since at instant speed the same effect would turn every trade into a punishing ambush. It wants a board already spewing fodder, where the sacrifice reads as value rather than tax and shedding a creature you were content to lose comes back as profit. Absent that context, the additional cost is steep enough to make it a worse Murder, which is precisely the tension the design is built around.