Gideon's Defeat

Color-restricted removal has always been the cheapest removal Wizards is willing to print: a one-mana exile is a rate you only get when the spell can do nothing against half the board. Pointing it at white creatures alone is the constraint that buys the efficiency, and the combat clause narrows the target further. The creature has to be attacking or blocking for this to have a legal target, which means the card sits dead in hand until the white deck commits something to the red zone, and is worthless against the white threat that never bothers to attack or block at all. Exile rather than destruction is the meaningful detail, since the creatures worth spending a card to remove against another white deck tend to recur or care about dying, and exile sidesteps both. The five life on a Gideon planeswalker is a flavor rider stapled to a condition that asks a great deal to ever fire: a Gideon has to be animated into a creature and then sent into combat for the clause to matter, a sequence that rarely lines up with wanting to spend a removal spell on it. The whole template belongs to a small family of one-mana single-color hosers, built so a deck can answer the threats it cannot otherwise beat at almost no cost, in exchange for a card that does nothing against everything else. It is exactly as good as the opponent is white, and exactly as useless as they aren't.