Daraja Griffin
A pure hate card from the era when sideboard creatures wore their targets on their sleeves. The flying body is just enough to matter on a stalled board, but the reason it exists is the sacrifice clause: a one-time, color-locked removal spell that destroys any black creature, large or small, for the price of giving up the griffin. The narrowness is what pays for the power. By restricting the target to black creatures, white gets an unconditional destroy effect that would have been overpowered as an open-ended Murder, and it gets to ride a 2/2 flier that does honest work even when the kill clause is dead. The sacrifice cost is the other half of the balance: this is a single shot, not a repeatable engine, so it answers one threat and then leaves the board. None of this makes the removal absolute. It is a targeted "destroy," so a black creature with regeneration can simply regenerate, and because the ability comes from a white source, anything with protection from white cannot be targeted at all. That contingency is the point. This is the color-pie ethos of the period made literal: white paying for premium removal with conditionality and a body it must give up, rather than the flat, flexible answers later sets would normalize. The "destroy a creature of an enemy color" template recurred for years afterward in various costumes, but few examples wear the friction this plainly: a creature whose entire second mode depends on what your opponent chose to play.
