Shoot the Sheriff

Unconditional two-mana creature removal is a rate black rarely gets for free; the color's history of premium kill spells almost always carries a rider (a life payment, an exile-only clause, a can't-regenerate line, a restriction to attacking or nonblack creatures). The tax here is different. It doesn't cost you life or tempo; it costs you targets. The gate carves out the five criminal creature classes and refuses to point at any of them, which turns an otherwise clean answer into something conditional in exactly the games where the theme is loudest. Against a board of ordinary beaters it reads as Doom Blade with a generous list of exceptions; against a deck built around those types, whole swaths of the opposing side become untouchable. That is the design trick worth naming: the restriction isn't a fixed downside baked into every game, it's a variable one that scales with what sits across the table. A removal spell whose reliability depends on your opponent's decklist is a rarer creature than one whose reliability depends on what you pay, and it makes the card behave like a barometer for how crime-dense the room is rather than a flat answer you can always trust. The rate is premium, but it comes with a wager on the metagame instead of a wager on your own resources.