Bounty Agent

The tax here is structural: destroying a legendary permanent costs a tap and the creature itself, not mana, so answering an opponent's marquee threat means spending a body and a tempo beat rather than a card from hand. That makes this less a removal spell than a clock-and-deterrent, a body that develops your board while sitting on the option to trade itself for a singleton across the table. The narrow target list (legendary artifacts, creatures, or enchantments only) is what pays for the rate, and it reads as deliberate color-pie discipline: white gets to police the most dangerous unique permanents in a format without receiving a general-purpose answer to everything. Vigilance is the quiet linchpin. Since the activation costs the tap, an ordinary attacker would have to choose between swinging and holding up destruction; vigilance lets it do both, so the 2/2 keeps pressuring life totals while the threat of its ability hangs over the table on its own. It belongs to a lineage of white maindeck answers pointed at specific permanent types, kin to the on-sight artifact and enchantment hate white has always carried, but aimed at the rising tide of legendary build-arounds instead. The result is a creature whose value stays mostly latent: honest combat work until the moment a legendary lands, at which point it becomes the cleanest possible reply.