Misery's Shadow

The shade got a graveyard-hate job stapled to it, and the pairing is smarter than the rate looks. A 2/2 that pumps for a single mana is a Shade in the oldest sense, tracing back to the Alpha-era Frozen Shade template where every point of unspent mana became a point of power: a beater that scales with a full untapped board rather than fizzling as a vanilla two-drop late. What separates this one is the passive: opponents' creatures never reach the graveyard, they land in exile instead. That shuts off recursion, delirium, undergrowth, escape, and reanimation before the fuel ever arrives, and it does so without asking you to spend a card or a dedicated slot. Most graveyard hate shows up as an artifact or a one-shot spell that does nothing to the board; folding the effect onto an attacker means the hate rides a card you already wanted to cast. The exile clause is a static replacement effect, not a triggered one, so there is no window to respond to it and nothing to sacrifice around; note it only redirects creatures that would die, so leaves-the-battlefield triggers still fire, but anything keyed to a card actually sitting in the graveyard never gets its material. The mana sink keeps it live deep into a game: hold up untapped lands and the 2/2 becomes an arbitrary-sized instant-speed threat. A beater that quietly closes the back door while swinging through the front.