Radiant's Judgment

The power-4-or-greater clause is the design hinge: it draws a clean line between the small creatures white aggro fields and the fat threats green and red ramp into, so the spell answers exactly the bodies white wants dead while staying useless against the ground troops it already beats in combat. That conditionality is the price of efficiency, and cycling is the rebate. White had been collecting these targeted-by-keyword removal spells across the Urza block, each a hard answer welded to a draw-a-card escape hatch so the card never sits dead in hand against the wrong matchup: if there's nothing big to kill, you pay two and dig instead. It is the template that taught a generation of deckbuilders to stop sideboarding out narrow removal and start maindecking it, because the floor isn't a dead card, it's a cantrip. The instant timing matters too: holding it up lets you punish the ramp deck the turn its threat resolves rather than guessing at sorcery speed. Later white removal kept circling this exact shape (a power-gated kill spell with a cycling or escape valve attached), but the formula starts with answers built so the dead-card scenario simply doesn't exist.