Exclusion Mage
Tempo distilled into a creature body: the entrance bounces an opposing creature back to hand, buying a turn on the board while leaving a 2/2 behind to keep the pressure on. This is the bottle-the-Man-o'-War design space, the Wizard version of a generic ETB bounce stapled to a real attacker, but the targeting clause is tighter than the classics. The trigger only hits a creature an opponent controls, so there is no flexibility to rebuy your own enters-the-battlefield creatures or save a threatened blocker; the card is built to set the opponent back and nothing else. That narrow target is also what keeps it honest, since a free, self-targetable bounce on a body would be far stronger than three mana wants to pay for. The body and the trigger pull in the same direction: drop it on a clogged board to clear the best blocker and swing, or hold it to undo an opponent's tempo play and replace their development with your own. Bounce never permanently answers anything, so the value here is measured in the turns it steals rather than the bodies it removes, which makes the Wizard typing more than incidental flavor in decks that care about assembling a tribe of them.



