Final Judgment
What two extra generic mana buy over Wrath of God is permanence. A destroy-all leaves a graveyard full of recursion targets: regenerating bodies shrug it off, Persist and Undying counters reset and rebuy the creature, reanimation decks treat the yard as a staging area, and aristocrats payoffs fire on every death. Exiling instead closes all of those doors at once. No regeneration shield matters, no death trigger goes off, and the creatures are simply gone rather than waiting to be replayed. Every board wipe wrestles with the same underlying problem: a destroy effect is cheap and feels symmetrical, but it quietly rewards the player who built to recover from it. The clean version costs more (six mana to Wrath's four), and that surcharge is the price of denying the rebuy: you pay it precisely when killing the creatures is not enough and you need them to stay dead. Against a generic creature deck the extra two mana is dead weight, which is the restriction that earns the card its slot only against graveyard-centric and recursive strategies, where the difference between destroyed and exiled is the difference between a stall and a win. The surgical sibling in white's line of mass removal, reached for when the yard is the real threat.


