Alabaster Host Intercessor

The trick with a temporary-exile enters-the-battlefield creature is that its removal is only ever a loan: the exiled threat returns the moment the body dies, so you are buying tempo, not a permanent answer. That framing matters more than the 3/4 suggests, because every trade the opponent forces is also a way to unwind your best play. What keeps a six-mana removal-on-a-stick from ever sitting dead in hand is the second half of the card: draw it in a game where the exile does nothing, or where you are simply short on lands, and it discards for a Plains instead. That flexibility is the real load-bearing decision here, an old lesson in cycling design carried onto a threat rather than a spell. The lineage runs through Fiend Hunter and the many enter-to-exile bodies since: creatures that fold removal into combat presence but come with the built-in liability that killing them refunds the answer. Wrapping that effect in a card you can always pitch for a land is the wrinkle that separates it from its predecessors, turning a conditional midrange threat into something that never rots in your hand. The Plains-only ceiling on the cycling is the cost of that safety valve: the fixing it fetches is narrow, but it is always there, and it is precisely why the body can afford to be this situational.