Smite the Deathless

Burn spells have always been the wrong tool against indestructible creatures: three damage bounces harmlessly off anything that cannot be destroyed by damage, and red rarely gets to answer the graveyard-recursion threats or protection-heavy commanders that live in that space. This one is built to close both loopholes in a single instant. Stripping indestructible until end of turn means the three damage actually resolves as lethal, and the replacement clause that exiles instead of killing turns the spell into a hard answer against anything that expects to come back: creatures with persist, cards that promise to return from the graveyard, tokens with death triggers you would rather not feed. The design is a deliberate widening of red's answer set into territory white and black usually police. The catch is the fixed ceiling on the damage: three points finishes most of the toolbox targets it wants to hit, but a genuinely large threat shrugs it off, and the indestructible-stripping does nothing on a creature that was never indestructible to begin with. That narrowness is the point. It is a scalpel aimed at a specific, previously red-proof class of creature, not a catch-all removal spell, and it reads as red finally being handed a clean line against the recursion and protection strategies that used to walk through a face full of damage untouched.