Cleanse

The hatred-of-a-color sweeper, drawn at its sharpest point. Four mana for a one-sided wrath against a single color is a rate the modern game would never print at common or even uncommon, but the Legends design context is the key: this is a sideboard card from an era when "sideboard card" meant a hard counter to an entire color's strategy, not a flexible answer that incidentally helps a matchup. The asymmetry is total (black creatures die, everything else lives, no caveats) and the color pie logic is straight from the period when white's role against black was framed as moral opposition rather than mechanical contrast. The four-mana cost is the only restraint, and it is barely one against the black decks of the time, which leaned on Hypnotic Specter, Sengir Vampire, and the various drainers Legends itself was printing. The premise is what feels archaic, not the rate: that a card answering exactly one color, with no upside in any other matchup, was a reasonable thing to spend a deck slot on. The design language of color-hosers softened through the nineties and was effectively retired by the time Onslaught arrived; cards like Karma and Tsunami belong to the same lost category. Cleanse is the sweeper-shaped version of that category, preserved in amber.