Trostani's Judgment

Exile is the premium of white removal: it sidesteps regeneration, indestructibility, and the death triggers that punish cleaner kills, and it answers anything with the word "creature" on it regardless of color or size. The price for that universality here is bluntness. Six mana at instant speed buys you one unconditional exile, a rate that would be embarrassing on a card built only to kill things. The populate clause is what reframes the whole spell. Tacking a token-copy onto a removal effect turns a removal slot into a tempo swing: you subtract a creature from across the table and add one of your own in the same breath, provided you already control a token worth copying. That conditional is doing real design work. Populate is parasitic by nature, useless when your board holds no creature tokens, so the card is openly asking to be built around rather than slotted into any white deck. In a board state that supplies a strong token (a Wurm, a fattened Soldier, anything with relevant keywords), the effect lands as removal plus a body, and the six-mana tag starts to look like a discount on two cards. Strip the token away and it collapses back into one of the slowest exile effects white has ever priced. That swing between modes, from clumsy to genuinely two-for-one, is the entire identity here: it is a removal spell that only earns its cost in a deck already invested in making copies.