Baleful Mastery

Premium exile removal has always carried a pricing problem: banishment that ignores recursion, indestructibility, death triggers, and regeneration tends to invalidate everything cheaper that came before it. This card answers that by splitting into two honest gears rather than one overpowered one. Pay the full cost and it exiles a creature or planeswalker cleanly, with nothing handed back. Pay the cheaper cost and it becomes some of the most efficient catch-all removal black has for those two card types, the discount funded by a single card slipped into the opponent's hand: the threat you erased is partially repaid, but the tempo swing stays with you. Exile is what makes both modes matter more than the price break itself, because it steps past the failure points that dog black's usual answers, no death trigger to eat, no indestructible body to shrug it off. Instant speed sharpens the cheap mode: you can hold the answer until a threat has fully committed (a planeswalker that has ticked up, a creature mid-swing, a combat step already turned lethal), then erase it at the moment it costs the opponent the most. The card that comes with the discount is calibrated so the bargain rarely feels free, and every fresh draw reopens the same question, patient mode or greedy mode. The two costs read as two genuinely different spells sharing one printing.