Worthy Cost

One mana to exile a creature or planeswalker is a rate black essentially never gets: black's usual removal destroys, and even its rare exile effects tend to cost more or claw back life. The price here is a creature, dead before the spell resolves, and that single additional cost reroutes the whole transaction. It is not a tax the deck grudgingly absorbs; it is the reason the card exists. From a stalled board in the wrong shell, the sacrifice turns clean removal into a lopsided exchange, one threat gone but two of your cards spent. But feed it a shell that wants creatures to die anyway (a board generating tokens, a graveyard worth stocking, a death trigger waiting to fire) and the cost inverts into upside: a spent token becomes permanent exile of the opponent's best creature or planeswalker while the engine underneath keeps humming. The mandatory sacrifice buys the reach, both the low mana cost and the exile clause that a straight destroy effect would not warrant. It sits among the black effects that resolve the "removal wants to be cheap, exile wants to be expensive" tension by charging in bodies rather than mana or life, and it commits harder to that trade than most: the creature is not a discount lever you can skip, but a required ingredient the deck has to be built to supply.