Spread the Sickness

Unconditional creature removal at this cost is a deliberate overpay, and the surcharge buys the proliferate rider stapled behind it. Strip the destroy clause and you are paying a premium to advance every counter on the board at once, which lands very differently depending on what your board is made of. In a deck stacked with planeswalkers, the kill spell becomes a tempo play that also ticks every loyalty toward an ultimate; in a +1/+1 counters shell, it grows your team mid-removal; against an opponent carrying poison or charge counters, it can quietly advance an alternate clock. The destroy-then-proliferate sequence matters too, since you can blow up a blocker and pump the survivors in the same breath. What keeps the card honest is that it does only one of these jobs well at a time: as raw interaction it overpays, and as a proliferate engine it spends a removal spell you might rather hold. Removal that doubles as a counter payoff is a narrow lane, and this is one of the cleaner examples of the genre: it asks you to build a board where proliferating is worth the cost, then rewards you for doing both jobs in a single cast.