Bogslither's Embrace

Unconditional exile in black has always come with a tariff, because clean removal that ignores indestructibility, regeneration, and death triggers is not something the color is supposed to have for free. This spell prices that exile in a decision: shrink a body you already control, or pay a stiff three extra mana. The blight clause is the interesting half. Rather than a flat life payment or a graveyard tax, it asks you to spend toughness sitting on the battlefield, which reframes the whole spell around what you are running alongside it. A go-wide token deck barely notices a debuff dropped onto an expendable attacker; a build stocked with undying creatures actively wants it, since the minus counter cancels the plus counter undying leaves behind and resets the loop. The pay- alternative keeps the card castable when nothing is worth blighting, so it never becomes a dead answer in a control shell, just an expensive one. What makes the design tick is that the cheap mode and the flexible mode live on the same card: an aggressive board that always has fodder to shrink gets premium exile at two mana, while the deck that sometimes has nothing to diminish still gets to point it at a resilient threat and pay full freight. The cost line, not the effect, is where all the deckbuilding pressure lives.