Terror of the Peaks
Oracle Text
Flying
Spells your opponents cast that target Terror of the Peaks cost an additional 3 life to cast.
Whenever another creature enters the battlefield under your control, Terror of the Peaks deals damage equal to that creature's power to any target.
And many aggro decks can deal with it easily as well if they are just holding a removal for it.
This terror of the peaks is much better although I don't think it's that good either. It takes over a game just the same if unanswered but is more guaranteed damage. A potentially suitable topend for something like gruul. Baneslayer is mostly a sideboard card to punish players siding out too much removal.
It's one of the things that greatly killed my interest in the game. You shouldn't have to sacrifice flavor for function, but the modern game makes that very difficult.
But, when was the last time you saw a deck in Standard that used a Dragon? Demons are a little more likely to be seen, but not by much. And really, if you're playing a Dragon deck, you have burn. If you're playing a Demon deck, you've got targeted removal. Baneslayer is good, but it doesn't have Hexproof and Indestructible.
In fact, I don't think there's a single deck in the current Meta that uses a Dragon or a Demon, unless there's a Sprite Dragon deck that I don't know about.
Not every deck will be running white and/or have enough for Baneslayer, though.
That's part of the problem. Putting on two kinds of protection that are so narrow doesn't benefit most games. But if they every did make a really good demon or dragon card that was significant enough for people to sideboard BSA it would be a harder shut-down than is deserved.
Protection is a bad mechanic. Its a good thing that it appears less than it used to. Until end of turn protection is fine if a resource was spent to give it, but no one enjoys games that are decided by one creature that is protected against everything that matters.
Lets say instead of Shock there was a card called "I hate Steve" which was a R instant that did 2 damage to any target, but if the target was a player named Steve it did 5 damage instead. This would not impact the metagame and most players would never notice the change, but it would be a middle finger to everyone named Steve and there would be no gain for the game in doing this.
There is no reason to fill a card's textbox with hate that kills design space, and that's what BSA does. And when evaluating every demon and dragon henceforth the question that needs to be asked is can you beat someone using Baneslayer.
If one player is using this dragon and the cards that support it and their opponent runs BSA and the cards that typically go with it, the BSA wins the damage race in a game that is not fun for either player. The only red deck hope is that they don't draw their BSA's or they get land screwed or other ways in which the white deck does not get to play the game.