Eat to Extinction

Exile-based removal at four mana is a familiar rate for black, but the choice to answer both creatures and planeswalkers in one clause is what gives this its shape. Black has always paid a premium to hit permanents it cannot handle through destruction: indestructibility, death triggers, recursion loops, the graveyard value that makes ordinary kill spells backfire. Exile sidesteps all of it, and doing so at instant speed means the answer can wait for the attack step, the activation, or the moment a planeswalker resolves rather than committing on your own turn. The surveil 1 is the tell about how the card was meant to be used. It is not a value engine; it is a small hand-smoothing performed as the spell resolves, letting the same removal that stops an attacker also nudge your next draw or seed a graveyard you actually want to fill. That pairing (clean, universal removal plus a low-stakes filtering step) reflects a design era comfortable stapling minor card selection onto otherwise straightforward interaction, so one spell serves a fair midrange deck and a graveyard-forward one without changing a word. The premium over the tightest black removal is the price of that flexibility: no drawback for the opponent to exploit, and a spell that does exactly one thing cleanly and hands you a single small decision on the way out.