Soul Reap

Two mana to kill almost anything, with a color-pie tax wired into the spell rather than bolted on. The destroy clause is wide open save the green exemption, the only restriction on the kill itself; the three-life rider is what asks for commitment, applying only if you've already cast a black spell that turn. That ordering is the design's whole shape. The card wants to fire second, after a discard spell or another removal spell has gone first, paying you a Lava Spike's worth of reach for sequencing your turn around it. In isolation it's a clean but unremarkable destroy effect that politely ignores green threats; cast after a black-heavy curve has already opened, it doubles as a finisher in attrition mirrors where three to the face closes a game the board can't. The green clause is the era's tell: this comes from a stretch of design where black's removal was deliberately fenced off from the one color it was supposed to struggle against, an ideological line drawn straight through the kill spell rather than tacked on as a drawback. The reward rides on top of that restriction, not against it, which makes the card a quiet case study in encouraging mono-color density without ever printing the word devotion.