Cruel Alliance

Teamwork reframes the old exile-a-small-creature template as a scaling deal rather than a fixed one. The floor is a conditional Doom Blade: three mana to exile any creature with mana value three or less, no strings, no crackback exposure since exile sidesteps regeneration and death triggers alike. But the additional cost turns the same card into an uncapped removal spell. Tap creatures totaling two power (a single mana dork, a pair of tokens, a chump that has already done its job), and the spell exiles any creature regardless of mana value and hands you three life on top. That structure asks you to spend a resource you often have lying around: bodies already on the board that are not attacking this turn. What makes the design interesting is how it prices flexibility. The card charges you nothing extra in mana to answer a fatty; it charges you tempo, the tapped creatures you would rather have kept up for blocks or for their own attacks. A board-flooded aggressive black deck pays that toll easily and gets a life swing besides; a control shell holding one blocker pays the fixed rate and takes the cheaper answer. It is a removal spell that reads the state of your board and adjusts its own ceiling, which is a cleaner way to build a modal effect than stapling two separate spells together with an "or."