Perfect Intimidation

Two effects that rarely share a card, welded by a modal choice that lets you take one or both. The hand-exile half is the durable one: forcing an opponent to exile (not discard) two cards sidesteps every graveyard recursion plan, and pulling from hand rather than the top of the library means you strip resources the opponent has already chosen to keep. The counter-removal half is the odd guest, reactive tech grafted onto an otherwise proactive attrition spell: it empties a +1/+1 investment, but the sharper use is stripping a finality counter or shield counter that was meant to save something once. The tension is that the two clauses want to live in different decks. Discard-based black attrition wants the exile mode; a board full of counter-based defenses wants the second. Bundling them and letting a single casting reach for both is how the card justifies four mana: on turns where both modes matter, one card answers two of an opponent's plans that neither a pure discard spell nor a pure counter-stripping spell could touch alone. Most of the time you pick one and treat the other as insurance, the kind of flexible-but-focused sorcery that ages well in decks built to trade one card for two of the opponent's. Note the target lines: the second mode reaches only a creature, so it never touches a planeswalker's loyalty. It is a creature-focused answer stapled to a hand-attack, not a catch-all.