Feast or Famine

The Alliances modal-instant template, working a design idea that was still novel in 1996: one card that bends to fill whatever slot a hand is short on. The split here is between a body and an answer, and the elegance is that both halves are useful at instant speed. With no creature worth killing across the table, it banks a 2/2 Zombie at end of turn; with a threat to point at, it becomes hard removal that denies regeneration. The cost of that flexibility is paid on the rate: four mana for a 2/2 is overpriced, and four mana for spot removal that whiffs on artifacts and black creatures is narrow, so neither mode is one you would run for its own sake. What you are buying is the option, the insurance that the card is never dead. The "nonblack" clause is the telling restriction; it keeps a black removal spell from being a clean catch-all in the mirror, a constraint Wizards has leaned on repeatedly to stop mono-black from answering everything for cheap. The "choose one" structure that reads as routine now was part of an early wave of modal design that let a single slot hedge against variance, an idea the game has spent the decades since refining into far sharper cards.