Angelic Ascension

The trade the opponent gets is the whole design conversation here. White has long owned catch-all answers that hit a threat regardless of type, but exiling a creature or a planeswalker with the same two-mana instant is rare width, and the price for that width is a 4/4 flier handed straight to the person you just disrupted. That concession is not fixed in size; it is set by what you point the spell at. Aim it at a planeswalker that has already ticked up and banked its value, a creature loaded with counters and auras, or an indestructible threat that laughs at ordinary removal, and the Angel you give back is a rounding error against the problem you cleanly erased. Aim it at a topdecked mana dork and you have upgraded the opponent's board for them. The card rewards asymmetric evaluation: the removal is only as good as the gap between what you exile and the body you leave behind. It descends from the exile-with-a-consolation-prize template white has cycled through in various shapes, buying width and cost by refunding the opponent a body. Instant speed is where the precision lives: it can wait for blocks to be declared, or answer a planeswalker on your opponent's end step after they have committed loyalty and passed. It cannot fizzle an ability already on the stack, since that ability lives independently of its source; the reach is in exiling the permanent, not in unwinding what it has already announced.