Driftgloom Coyote

The Oblivion Ring template gets a body attached to it, and the reward built into the trigger is for aiming small. Temporary exile tied to a permanent staying on the battlefield is old design: a removal effect with a built-in fail state, since answering the permanent hands the exiled creature back. Bolting that onto a 3/4 changes the calculus, because now the "answer me back" clause has to fight through a blocker and a clock rather than a static enchantment. Sending a small creature away adds the second job: against a big threat the card is pure stall, temporary removal that buys time; against mana dorks, one-drop hatebears, and aggressive early curves it grows into a 4/5 that punishes you for having tried to go under it. That asymmetry rewards hunting the cheap creatures it was built for rather than saving it for the fatty. It answers exactly what a slower white deck struggles against most: the early board that would otherwise snowball before removal comes online. Whether the exile sticks is the tension the whole card runs on, and the counter lives entirely on the coyote, so it dies with the exchange. Kill the coyote and you lose the counter and hand back the creature at once; the growth is real only while it survives, which is precisely why aiming it at a small threat that cannot punch back is the point.