Ashen Rider
Most permanent-removal creatures answer one threat and ask you to be satisfied; this Archon charges a steep eight-mana, double-pip price and pays it back twice. The exile clause fires on the way in and again on death, with no rarity or type limit on the target: any permanent, including the indestructible lands, planeswalkers, and enchantments that slip past most sweepers. That symmetry justifies the rate. A 5/5 flier is unremarkable at this cost, but the body is incidental to a card built to strip two permanents whether it lives or dies. The catch is the word "dies": the second exile only fires if the creature reaches the graveyard from the battlefield. A destroy effect or a sacrifice outlet hands you the bonus, but the cleaner answers route around it: bounce returns it to hand, exile-based removal like Swords to Plowshares takes it without a death, and tuck effects shuffle it away. The opponent's job, then, is not to kill it but to remove it without letting it die, which is a narrower and more expensive ask than usual. The exile itself is unconditional and color-blind, the kind of irreversible answer white-black gets precisely because the cost is prohibitive enough to keep it out of fair midrange. The flavor of an impartial judge passing sentence lands exactly: no destroy, no regeneration window, no recursion to undo the verdict. Exile is the harshest word in the rules text, and this card reaches for it twice.
