Withering Curse

A three-mana sweeper whose ceiling is unlocked by a resource black decks are already generating. Baseline, it is a modest board-shaver: -2/-2 to everything strips toughness off tokens, mana dorks, and small aggressive starts, but leaves anything sturdier standing. The infusion clause reroutes that entire ceiling. Trickle some life into your total before you cast it, and the same sorcery stops shrinking bodies and simply destroys every creature. What makes the design tick is where the condition sits: it checks whether you gained life this turn, not this game, so the payoff is a per-turn setup rather than a permanent unlock. That turns lifegain from an incidental gimmick into a live enabler, and it rewards decks already built to bleed value off their opponents (an early lifelink attacker connecting, a passive drain trigger, a life-payment engine that gives some back) without asking them to jump through combo hoops. The two modes also invert against one particular defense: indestructible creatures. The -2/-2 floor kills them when their toughness drops to zero, since state-based reduction ignores indestructibility entirely, while the "destroy all creatures" infusion (the ostensibly stronger mode) leaves them standing untouched. So the setup that upgrades the spell against ordinary boards quietly downgrades it against anything wearing indestructible. It is a soft-versus-hard sweeper folded into one card, the split governed entirely by whether you managed to nudge your life total upward before it resolves.