Close Encounter

Fight spells have always paid for their reach by asking your creature to sit in the crossfire; this one severs that link. The additional cost is choosing a creature, not committing it to the fight, so the damage lands without the return blow that Prey Upon or Rabid Bite would invite. The chosen creature never becomes a target, never takes damage, never has to be on the battlefield at all: it can be a warped card sitting in exile, converting a stat that would otherwise be stranded into a removal payment. That second clause is the real design tell. It turns exile from a one-way trip into a resource, letting a big warped body pull double duty as a burn multiplier long after it has left play, and it means the removal scales with cards you have already committed rather than a spell on the stack. At instant speed for two mana, it slots into the green removal lineage as a fight variant that has quietly removed the two features that always held fights back: the mutual damage and the requirement that your muscle be present and unbusy. What green trades for that clean profile is the setup: without a fat creature or a stocked exile zone, the spell has nothing to fire, so the power that pays for it has to be built before the card can matter.