Martyr's Cry

A color-hosed sweeper from the era when Magic's design philosophy openly rewarded paying attention to what your opponent was playing. The structural quirk is in who pays. The caster spends the card from hand to cast it, and only draws if their own white creatures are caught in the wipe; a creatureless control deck firing this at a white-weenie board exiles everything across the table, draws nothing, and ends a card behind for the privilege. Meanwhile the opponent refills one-for-one off their own losses. So the effect is a one-sided board clearance bought at a real card cost, which only pays off when the asymmetry of white creatures on each side is wide enough to make the tempo and board swing worth the down card. The symmetry of the draw clause is the point and the limitation at once. What ages well is the banishment itself: in a period when most removal sent things to the graveyard, permanently exiling creatures dodged white's deep recursion lines and left no bodies for reanimation or sacrifice payoffs. That precision is also its ceiling. A sweeper that only sees white is dead weight against any deck that does not lean on white creatures, which is exactly the wager the designers wanted players making when they reached for narrow answers in Magic's early years: a cheap, surgical hoser that punishes you for guessing the metagame wrong.