Check for Traps

Duress and its descendants tell you what you are taking; this one makes you gamble on what the opponent is holding. The reveal comes first and the choice comes second, so you always exile the best nonland card you can see. What flips is who pays the toll: strip an instant or a flash card and the opponent bleeds, take anything else and the life loss lands on you. Ordinary hand disruption prices its power in the fixed mana cost; this one adds a second, situational cost that punishes you for the reach it grants. It rewards discipline about the field you are playing into: against a deck stuffed with counterspells and combat tricks, the ability becomes a free strip that also drains, while against a creature-and-sorcery hand it charges you a life for every card you want gone. The lineage here is black's old bargain of paying life for information advantage, but where cards like Sign in Blood or Night's Whisper meter the cost up front, this one hides it behind the opponent's deckbuilding. You do not know the toll until you have already committed to the effect, and by then the reveal has told you whether you guessed right.