Price of Betrayal

Counter removal is a specialist tool, and this is the widest single-shot version of it for one black mana: up to five counters peeled from almost anything that can carry them. The list of legal targets is where the design gets pointed. It scrubs +1/+1 counters off a threat (yours or theirs), strips loyalty from a planeswalker (five is enough to defuse most freshly cast ones), and peels charge counters off an artifact engine. The reach into "opponent" as a legal target is the wrinkle: the other three types are permanents, but a player is not, so the spell can delete resources that never sat on the battlefield. That directionality is asymmetric on purpose. Against an artifact, creature, or planeswalker it works on any controller, so it can rescue your own permanent from a stun counter or a stray shrink. Against a player it only ever targets an opponent, which is what lets it attack the counters players bank toward a win: an experience-counter engine, a stockpile of energy, a poison total you have inflicted on an opponent. What it cannot do is reach across to a player who is not your opponent, meaning it never pulls a counter off you personally: no poison relief when you are the one being infected. A deck facing no counters at all gets nothing from it, which pins its value to the accounting-based matchups it is built against; against those, one black mana buying five counters of disruption is a rate no other color reaches.