Vengeful Dreams

Removal priced in cards rather than mana is rare for a reason: it asks you to spend the most fungible resource in the game, raw hand size, to buy a one-sided combat blowout. The math is unforgiving on its face, since exiling X attackers costs X cards discarded plus the spell itself, always leaving you down on cards even as you pull ahead on the board. The trade only makes sense when discard is something other than a loss: a reanimation shell pitching fatties it wants in the bin, a control deck dumping dead late-game spells to wipe a board it could not otherwise survive. For those decks, the cards spent were never going to be cast, so the card disadvantage is notional and the mana efficiency (two white for an arbitrarily wide sweep) is the whole appeal. Exile rather than destroy is what raises the ceiling: indestructible attackers, regenerators, and recursion targets all stay gone. The instant-speed window is what makes the cost worth paying, letting you wait until every attacker is committed before deciding how many to answer, so X is set with full information rather than blind on your own turn. Coming out of an era that pushed graveyard mechanics across every color, it reads less as a clean removal spell than as a discard outlet that happens to remove creatures, converting cards you wanted gone anyway into a defensive sweep. For a deck that prizes its hand it is a non-starter; for one that treats discard as fuel, it is a blowout waiting for a wide enough attack.