Honor the Fallen

Graveyard hate of this vintage was almost always white, and almost always a blunt instrument: exile the threat and let the player who cared about it sort out the consequences. The twist here is the life-gain clause, which inverts the usual cost structure of a hate spell. Most graveyard hate spends mana to neutralize an opponent's resource while leaving your own board untouched; this one pays you back proportionally, so a single cast against a yard stuffed with creatures becomes a real life swing rather than a tempo-neutral tax. The scaling is the design's whole point: the wider the creature count, the larger the reward, so the card grows against exactly the strategies it punishes. The exile clause is also narrower than it looks, and that narrowness shapes when you cast it. Only creature cards leave; lands, instants, and sorceries stay put. So this is not a catch-all yard reset but a targeted answer to the things that want bodies in the graveyard: reanimation piles, recursion loops, creature-based sacrifice engines. The instant timing lets you wait until the opponent has committed those creatures to the yard, then strip the relevant pile at the moment of maximum value while banking a life cushion against the aggression that tends to fill graveyards in the first place. A narrow effect with sound logic: the answer rewards patience and charges its toll to the decks least expecting to be paid against.