Smother

Black removal has always paid for its efficiency somewhere: regeneration clauses to dodge, "nonblack" riders to honor color-pie tradition, or a sorcery-speed restriction that hands the opponent a clean window. This trades all of that away for a single dial: it can only hit creatures with mana value three or less. Inside that ceiling it asks no further questions. It does not care about color, toughness, indestructibility-via-regeneration (it shuts that off explicitly), or whether the thing it's killing is a token or a bomb. At instant speed for two mana, it answers the curve where most aggressive and combo-relevant creatures actually live: the mana dorks, the disruptive two-drops, the cheap engine pieces that win games before anything bigger arrives. The design wager is that the most dangerous creatures are often the cheapest ones, and that a cap on cost is a cleaner tax than a cap on color or a regeneration loophole. Where Doom Blade and its descendants spent their power budget on a color exclusion, this spends it on a numeric one, and the numeric line ages better: a metagame full of one- and two-drops never grows out of its reach the way a black-creature exclusion fails against a black opponent. The cost ceiling is the whole tension, and it makes the card a precise instrument rather than a universal one.