Divine Smite

Removal that reads its target's color before it decides how hard to swing: against any threat it buys a turn, phasing the permanent out of existence until its controller's next untap, but against a black target it upgrades to permanent exile. That split is the whole point. Phasing is a soft answer, temporary by construction, but it has virtues destruction lacks: no death triggers to hand the opponent value, no indestructible or regeneration to blank the spell, and everything attached travels with the creature, which simply ceases to interact until it returns. Exile is the hard answer, and gating it behind a single color turns a clean tempo play against most of the color pie into full, permanent removal whenever the opponent is in black. The impulse is white's old preference for setting a threat aside rather than killing it outright, now paired with a keyword that strips the usual liability of a temporary answer. What makes the design worth studying is how phasing sidesteps the indestructible-and-regeneration arms race entirely: it never asks whether the target can be legally destroyed, only whether it can be legally targeted, and then removes it from the game state on its own terms. A conditional exile on a two-mana instant is a rate white rarely earns, and the color condition does exactly the load-bearing work the color's philosophy demands: mercy by default, retribution against the one color that most deserves it.