Magistrate's Veto

The whole card is a hate piece aimed at exactly two colors, and the targeting tells you everything about how it was built to read. Red sits in the part of the color pie that resents control and white-weenie defenses, so the design answers both at once: turn off the blockers that blue and white lean on, then let the red beaters walk through unobstructed. Note what it does not do. It is not removal, it does not deal damage, and it does not touch creatures of other colors; it only strips the block. That narrowness is the point. The card is a permanent, so once it resolves it keeps shutting off white and blue blockers every combat without further investment, which is a stronger long-game proposition than a one-shot Falter effect that only opens a single attack. The cost of that permanence is that it is dead weight against any opponent who is not playing white or blue, a metagame gamble baked into the card rather than a flexible answer. It belongs to the lineage of color-hosing enchantments that older sets printed freely, where a card could simply name two of the five colors and punish them. Designers largely retired that approach once the painful asymmetry of opening a deck to one matchup and bricking against the rest became a known feel-bad, which is why the shape of this card reads as a fossil of an era when color hate could be this blunt.