Exile

Premium-grade white color-hosing from the era when the color pie still policed itself by naming the enemy out loud. The "nonwhite" tax does the structural work: this is exile-on-a-stick that white earns against every color but its own, a handcuff that makes the spell a dead draw in a white mirror but a clean blowout against everyone else. Add the attacking restriction and the card lives entirely in the combat step, an instant-speed answer that punishes the aggressor and never the patient defender. The lifegain scales to toughness rather than power, which quietly rewards exiling the fat body that overcommitted to the attack over the glass-cannon beater: the bigger the creature, the bigger the cushion.

The card carries a piece of rules history in its bones. It originally read "remove from the game," the language white used before the exile keyword existed; the Oracle template has since been updated to the modern wording, so a card named Exile now actually begins with the word "Exile," the vocabulary finally catching up to the title. It marks one of the conditional, color-locked answers that white spent decades slowly unwinding: later white removal traded the color tax for restrictions on tapped creatures, on attackers, on mana value, but rarely committed this hard to punishing a single side of the color wheel. The balancing lever here was never the cost; it was a line drawn down the middle of the color pie, with the card standing firmly on white's side of it.