Major Teroh

This was an era when one color became the loud mechanical center of a set, and the answer printed in white was less a removal spell than a referee's whistle: a one-sided sweeper that exiles every black creature on the battlefield, the controller's own included if any happen to be there. The asymmetry is the design tension. A board wipe pointed at a single color punishes whoever committed hardest to that color, which is exactly the deck the surrounding cards were busy enabling. The exile clause does heavier lifting than the scope does: against decks built on recurring creatures from the graveyard, sending those bodies to exile rather than the yard is what actually shuts the door instead of slowing it. What keeps the card honest is the double tax. Four mana buys a 2/3 flier that contributes nothing to the matchup it was built for, then and the creature itself fire the ability. You pay twice and lose your blocker in the bargain. The one piece of flexibility that softens the bill: the activation carries no timing restriction, so it can sit up at instant speed and resolve in response to an opponent's attack or after they have committed a fresh threat to the board, rather than being stranded to your own main phase. That window lets you wait until the swing is largest before clearing it, turning a sluggish answer into a punish aimed at their tempo.