Ray of Enfeeblement

The old way to hate a color was to commit a slot to a matchup you might never draw: pure hosers like Gloom, or a color-locked kill spell, were dead weight the moment your opponent turned out to be playing something else. This reframes the guess as a rider rather than a gamble. The floor is a functional shrink against anything with a body: -4/-1 for a single black mana at instant speed clears small creatures, blunts a chump attacker, or strips a mana dork's usefulness. That baseline keeps it live in any matchup. Against white the clause upgrades it to -4/-4, which crosses the line from a trick into a genuine kill spell that answers most of what the color puts on the table, from token swarms to midrange bodies. The split is the whole design idea: the anti-white payoff is stapled to a card that already earns its slot, so drawing it against a non-white deck costs you a little rather than everything. Instant timing sharpens both modes. Held for combat, it lets a smaller blocker eat a bigger attacker while surviving, or shrinks an attacker below lethal so a defender lives. And because it resolves at instant speed, the -4/-4 mode can trade up mid-combat against a creature the opponent has already committed to an attack or block. It is a modern answer to an old question: how to punish a specific color without punishing yourself when you guess wrong.