Curse of the Swine

Removal that refuses to actually remove. Exile is the strongest verb in blue's small toolbox of creature answers, and this spell hands it out in bulk: point it at indestructible gods, recursive threats, or aura-laden voltron commanders, and they leave the battlefield with no death trigger to honor and no graveyard to crawl back from. The catch is the consolation prize. Every creature exiled comes back as a 2/2 green Boar for its controller, so you have not subtracted a body so much as standardized one. Against a 7/7 with trample that trade is enormous; against a board of 2/2s, you have paid mana to swap the population without thinning it. That conditional shapes the targeting math: a scalpel for the few creatures that matter, dead weight against the many that do not. The X cost scales it from a clean one-for-one to a sweep that turns an opposing army into a herd of identical pigs, but every point of X is a point of green muscle handed across the table. The one gap in its coverage is a matter of legality, not size: because it targets, hexproof, shroud, and protection from blue all keep their creatures off the chopping block. Those protections live as static abilities on the battlefield, and no amount of X gets around them. Ward is the exception, since its tax resolves on the stack; you simply pay the extra cost, which is why the big, legal threats without evasion-from-blue clauses remain fair game.