Protective Response

Convoke on a removal spell rewrites the timing math of a combat trick. Unconditional destruction restricted to attackers and blockers has always been priced as a defensive backstop: hold up the mana, wait for the swing, kill the biggest threat. What convoke does is let the board already committed to combat pay for its own answer. Creatures tapped to attack can't help, but blockers, mana dorks, and any untapped body you're holding back all count toward the cost, and a white creature can even cover the colored pip, so the spell can conceivably cost nothing in mana when a wide board is straining every other resource. The tension is deliberate: convoke wants a full battlefield, but the effect only fires once combat is declared, so you're spending bodies you might otherwise want swinging or blocking to remove a single creature. Against a go-wide deck the discount is real; against a lone haymaker you're often paying close to full freight while your own creatures sit tapped out. A removal rate that gets cheaper as your board gets more useful elsewhere is the trade the whole card is built around, and it's why this reads less like a raw removal spell than a tempo lever: the question isn't whether you can kill the creature, it's what the tapped convoke fodder was going to do this turn instead.