Expunge

The cycling era's removal blueprint, distilled. The destroy effect is deliberately hemmed in on two axes: it cannot touch artifacts, and it cannot touch black creatures, leaving it as a clean answer to the rest of the board. The regeneration clause is built into the same line of text, so the kill sticks against the recursive green and white blockers of its day that would otherwise shrug it off. Those restrictions are what justify the rate and, more importantly, what let the card carry cycling at all. Removal that cycles is a design tension Wizards has returned to repeatedly: the card has to be good enough to play as a kill spell but flexible enough that drawing it against the wrong board never feels dead. Discard it for two and dig deeper, or hold it and answer the one creature it can actually hit. That dual mode is the whole pitch. The targeting holes are not an oversight; they are the reason a black instant gets to do this much. Where unconditional removal of the era was expensive or locked into a single mode, this offered an out clause printed right onto the card, the cycling cost serving as a guarantee against irrelevance. The template it set, conditional removal with an escape hatch stapled to the bottom, has outlived the specific numbers many times over.