Fear of Abduction
Removal that charges an entry fee in creatures is a strange trade to build, and this one resolves the tension by making the exiled body the ammunition. You feed one of your own creatures into the additional cost, get a 5/5 flier that banishes an opposing creature, and now carry two separate exile clauses on a single permanent. The wrinkle lives in the leaves-the-battlefield trigger: when the Nightmare leaves the battlefield, each card exiled with it goes to hand, so the creature you paid up front isn't gone (unless it was a token), it's held in escrow alongside the prisoner. That reframes the additional cost from a sacrifice into a deferral, and it puts a target on the body for both players. Kill it and the opponent reclaims their creature to hand while your fodder returns too; the whole exchange unwinds cleanly for everyone. The lineage here is the persistent-exile removal body, the family Fiend Hunter and Banisher Priest established, where an "exile until this leaves" clause turns a creature into a fragile jail cell the opponent is motivated to break. What this one adds is the entry cost that doubles as insurance: you're never down a card when it dies, only down tempo, because your fodder comes home with the released prisoner. It rewards decks already recurring their small creatures, since the additional cost stops feeling like a cost at all when the body you exiled was slated to re-enter anyway.
