Quote Originally Posted by Svata View Post
There's a few more hyper-efficient white removal spells, they're just narrower. Blazing Hope, Chained to the Rocks, Dispatch, Reciprocate, and possibly Time to Reflect. (I do admit black has the broadest removal, though). I just named the two best examples. And I did miss discard, which black is absolutely the best at. Black is also approximately equal with white in terms of mass removal (boardwipes/wraths/whatever you wanna call them)
Chained to the Rocks is the only one that gets even within the vicinity.
The problem is all of them have conditions, Path and Swords don't, they just have downsides.
You didn't name the two best examples, you named the two examples.

Quote Originally Posted by houlio View Post
As far the removal bit goes, I think a lot of a color’s identity has to with how it is used in practice. Swords and Path are among the most played cards in white (if not the most played). The argument that if a player runs into White and they start expecting path/swords, cheap removal with a drawback is probably part of White’s identity. It might not be designed with such in mind, but we also don’t think of the game and the colors in terms of design. We think mostly of them in terms of play.
That's not how the color wheel works.

There are also a lot of other effects on white that remove with drawback such as Oblation or Council’s Judgment (although the latter has no drawback outside of multiplayer).
Those are three mana, not really efficient.

Council's Judgment is great, but it's also different since it was made for a multiplayer set.