Council's Judgment
Most catch-all removal works by stating a category and obeying it: destroy target permanent, exile target creature, the answer constrained by what color and card type allow. This one routes around the category entirely. By exiling the permanent with the most votes, it can hit a planeswalker, an enchantment, an artifact, a creature, a token: any nonland permanent you don't control, with no targeting clause to be hexproofed or shrouded out of, and no "destroy" verb to be regenerated against or rewarded with a death trigger. The vote is the mechanism that makes that breadth legal. In a duel it collapses to something clean and reliable: you vote first, and the opponent's rational play is simply to echo your vote (voting for the same permanent avoids handing you a second exile), so the card resolves as a one-for-one answer to whatever you want gone, hexproof and indestructibility and all. White rarely gets to answer everything for three mana, and the versions that do usually carry a tax, a delay, or a downside; here the price is paid in flavor rather than rate. The will-of-the-council shell, built for multiplayer politics, is what disguised a near-universal exile spell as a group-table novelty. At a larger table it genuinely becomes negotiation, opponents stacking votes to redirect the exile onto a permanent you would rather keep, but even the worst outcome is still that something leaves the battlefield forever.

Rules text
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More formatsFewer formats
Other printings
- Secret Lair Drop#7041
- Outlaws of Thunder Junction Commander#79
- Secret Lair Drop#1635
- Secret Lair Drop#1635★
- Ravnica: Clue Edition#57
- The List#CNS-16
- Magic Online Promos#82820
- Vintage Masters#20









