Whirling Catapult
A flyer-hate engine that pays for itself in the worst currency Magic has: your own library. The activation cost is the whole story here. Two mana is nothing, but exiling the top two cards every time you fire the catapult turns it into a deck-burning clock that pings airborne creatures and chips away at life totals while it grinds your own draws into oblivion. That symmetry against players matters: the damage hits everyone, including you, so an unchecked grind whittles the table down alongside whatever flyers it was built to answer. The exile clause is the load-bearing restriction. These are not cards going to the graveyard where they might feed something; they are gone, gone in a way that does not refuel any strategy, so each activation is pure cost with no salvage value. The result is removal that scales its threat by how patient you can afford to be, which in practice means not very. The friction lives in repeated activation rather than a printed cap: no "tap, deal damage" simplicity, no once-per-turn governor metering how often you can reach for it. Instead you decide, every activation, how much of your future you are willing to torch to clear the skies right now. That self-limiting throttle is exactly the kind of restriction colorless utility carried before the keyword era smoothed the edges off, when an answer in any color was expected to cost something real beyond mana.

