Wicked Pact

A two-for-one removal spell engineered for a teaching environment, which is precisely why its cost reads the way it does. The Portal sets stripped out instants, complex targeting, and most of the stack, so a sorcery that destroys two creatures had to be balanced without the usual escape valves a black removal spell of this era would carry: no regeneration clause to dodge, no way to hold the answer up at the end of an opponent's turn. The designers paid for that double kill in life, and they paid steeply. Five life is a real chunk of a starting twenty, enough that casting this when you are behind can finish the job your opponent started. That is the structural discipline doing the work. A clean "destroy two creatures" at three mana would be a slam dunk; the life loss turns it into a tempo-and-attrition gamble where the body count has to be worth the burn to your own clock. Restricting the targets to nonblack creatures is the other tuning screw, a holdover from the period's habit of making black removal politely refuse to point at itself. None of this was aimed at competitive players; it was meant to read cleanly to a beginner unpacking a first deck. What lands is a card whose rate looks generous and whose true cost is hidden in a number that has nothing to do with mana, a more honest piece of design than the simplicity of the format suggests.