Starfall

The price tag is the first thing that needs explaining: five mana for three damage is a rate burn spells abandoned long ago, and on its own that line reads as a curiosity. What it's actually paying for is the conditional clause, born of an era when enchantment creatures walked the battlefield as a recurring threat. Against a creature that is also an enchantment, the spell stops being removal and becomes reach: three to the body, three to the head, all at instant speed. That second number is what pushes the cost up so far. The design problem it solves is a narrow one (how do you punish a deck leaning on enchantment-based bodies without printing a card that does nothing when those bodies aren't on the table?), and the answer here splits the difference by keeping the creature-damage mode universally live while reserving the burst for the right board. It's a hoser with a floor, which is a harder thing to build than a hoser with none. Where enchantment creatures aren't a fixture, the conditional almost never fires, and you're left holding a costly three-damage instant; where they are, it converts a removal slot into a closing tool. That dependency on a specific board state is exactly the kind of design that ages with its environment rather than with the format, which keeps the card tethered to whichever settings actually put enchantment bodies on the table.