Avenger en-Dal

White's repeatable removal has always carried a tax, because a body that can keep killing things threatens to snowball past anything an opponent can do about it. The Spellshaper template solved that by making each activation cost you a card out of hand on top of the mana, and this is the defensive specialist of that class. The fee here is steep: three mana, the creature's own tap, a discard, and a target that has already committed to the attack. That last clause is the load-bearing restriction. This is not open-ended removal; it is a combat-phase trap the opponent has to walk into, and even when it fires, the exiled attacker's controller is paid back life equal to the creature's toughness. Exile is what justifies the whole apparatus. In an era thick with regeneration and graveyard recursion, banishing an attacker outright sidestepped both at once, answering the indestructible blocker-buster and the come-back-later threat with the same activation. The lifegain rider is the brake on that clean answer, turning a one-sided removal into a transaction where the defender compensates the attacker for the privilege of removing it. What you get is a 1/1 that converts a stream of dead cards into a stream of exiled attackers, for as long as you can keep paying. Narrow by intent and slow by cost, but a real attrition piece in a grind, and a clear ancestor of how white's repeatable effects were priced for years afterward.