Outflank

The trade here is between board width and removal reach: one white mana buys damage that is entirely borrowed from your own side, so the spell does nothing on an empty board and scales toward a blowout when you are wide. That sourcing constraint also fixes the timing. It only touches creatures that are attacking or blocking, which pins the effect to the combat step and gives it a combat trick's window with a removal spell's ceiling. In a go-wide deck it reads as a cheap kill spell that punishes an attacker who committed to the swing or a blocker who stepped in front of your team, but the kill is never free of the target's toughness: because it deals damage rather than destroying, you need to control at least as many creatures as the target's toughness to finish the job. A three-toughness blocker survives against a board of two. In anything running a lean creature count it is a dead card, the honest price of a single pip. This is white's recurring bargain with combat-based removal, the kind that asks you to have already won the board-presence war before the card does anything; it pays out for the deck that is already ahead on bodies and abandons the one that is behind. A cheap payoff soldered to a deckbuilding prerequisite, only ever as good as the count you have kept on the table.