Reprisal

A removal spell built around a threshold rather than a clause, and the threshold is the whole design. Most fat creatures worth answering carry four or more power, so the gate reads as generous, but the inverse is the point: it leaves the small stuff alone. A two-power utility creature, a one-drop, a token swarm: all of them walk past it untouched. That makes the card a deliberately partial answer, priced cheap and at instant speed precisely because it cannot be pointed at everything. The "can't be regenerated" rider closes the loophole that mattered most when this was printed, when regeneration was the standard way a green or black fatty shrugged off targeted removal; without it, a clean kill at two mana would have been a paper one. What the design gets right is the matchup it implies: it is the answer a controlling or defensive deck reaches for when the problem is always the thing across the table that got large, the trampler or the haymaker that a normal blocker cannot stop. The cost it accepts for that efficiency is breadth. It does nothing against the early curve, nothing against a wide board of small bodies, and nothing against the disruptive utility creatures that often matter most. The power-four floor is what buys the instant speed and the two-mana rate, and it is exactly why the card was never the default white removal spell so much as a targeted answer to size.