Pyrrhic Strike

White's premium removal tends to attach a toll: an exile clause, an upkeep drain, a life payment, a flat inability to touch creatures at all. Blight relocates that toll onto your own board, two -1/-1 counters weighing down a single creature you control. The base spell is a respectable piece of flexibility on its own, a disenchant that can instead answer a mid-sized threat, but paying the blight cost collapses the either/or into both. When the additional cost is paid, the spell goes on the stack fully committed: both modes chosen, both targets declared, the artifact-or-enchantment and the mana-value-three-or-greater creature marked to die together the instant it resolves. The optionality is where the design shows discipline. The extra mode is never forced, so you never cripple a creature of your own when a single answer suffices; it stays reactive rather than becoming a combo enabler. Note the floor on the creature clause. It reaches only mana value three and up, so the leanest one- and two-drop threats slip beneath it, and the card is priced with that gap in mind. What sharpens the two-for-one is where the fuel comes from. Those counters cost no card from hand and no slot in your deck; they cost board presence you already spent, a token you can spare, a spent attacker, a mana dork that has done its job. The blight lands as genuine self-harm when you have nothing to spend it on and as a rounding error when you do, and reading which situation you are in is the whole decision.