Snuff Out
Free removal that bills you in blood instead of tempo. The printed cost is , but the alternative payment is the whole point: with a Swamp in play, you can destroy a nonblack creature for four life and no mana at all, holding up the answer while your real turn happens elsewhere. Routing the cost out of your life total rather than your turn is what keeps a free kill spell honest, and the two modes self-select by matchup but not the way intuition suggests. When you are flush with life, the four-life mode is nearly free, so you pay it and pocket the mana; the hardcast becomes the fallback for the games where four life is the resource you cannot spare (against aggression, or when your life total is already low) or where you simply have no Swamp. With a Swamp online, the card lets you route the cost into whichever currency is cheaper that turn. The life-payment mode also opens a window other removal cannot: because it costs nothing, you can cast it while tapped out, ambushing an opponent who attacks or commits a threat believing you have no answer available. That is the same trick that makes free-pitch instants like Daze and Misdirection feel larger than their printed cost. The nonblack restriction is the genre tax black has always paid on its removal, and the no-regeneration clause closes the era's standard escape hatch.
