Swords to Plowshares

The original one-mana removal benchmark, and the rate every white answer since has had to justify itself against. The design trick is the lifegain clause: by handing the opponent life equal to the creature's power, the card pays for its absurd efficiency in a currency that usually does not matter, and the printings that followed kept finding edge cases where it suddenly does. Against a 7/7 Eldrazi the drawback is academic; against a Death's Shadow deck or a burn race the clause flips from flavor text to genuine cost, and the player casting it has to decide whether the exile is worth the buffer they are handing over. Removing the creature from the game entirely, rather than destroying it, is what has kept the card relevant through every graveyard-centric era since: it predates the recursion arms race by years, but exile sidesteps every reanimation and graveyard shell that would otherwise blunt a kill spell. The lineage of restricted single-white removal (Path to Exile trading life for a land, Condemn requiring an attacker, Fateful Absence leaving a Clue, March of Otherworldly Light asking for an X) is the long tail of designers trying to recapture this rate with one more knob attached. None have displaced it where it is legal. The Alpha provenance is incidental to why it endures; the rate is the reason.