Waste Away

Five mana plus a discarded card to shave five points off a creature's toughness is a steep price for what amounts to conditional removal, and that math tells you exactly which era it belongs to. This is a black instant priced for a world before efficient kill spells were a baseline expectation, leaning into a graveyard-as-resource philosophy by folding the discard into the casting cost rather than bolting it on as a downside to mourn. A -5/-5 modifier kills almost any creature it points at, but it does not exile, does not touch the opponent's hand or wider board, and refuses to scale against the genuinely large threats that survive it. Pay attention to the discard, though, because it inverts the math. In a black deck built to fill its graveyard, throwing away a card to cast this is closer to fuel than to loss; flashback, threshold, and reanimation all turn the additional cost into a setup play rather than a tax. The card asks you to value cards in your bin as highly as cards in your hand, and pays you a removal spell for agreeing. Stripped of that context, it reads as overcosted, because by any modern rate it is. Read inside a deck that wanted things in the graveyard anyway, the cost was never as heavy as the converted mana value made it look.