Flay Essence

Exile as removal costs black a premium it doesn't usually pay: this line answers a planeswalker or a creature and leaves nothing behind, no graveyard trigger, no recursion, no death-touched loyalty to worry about. That permanence is the whole reason to reach past cheaper edicts and destroy-target spells; it turns a temporary answer into a clean one against a resilient threat. The lifegain clause is the wrinkle, and it's built for a specific shape of board: a creature loaded with +1/+1 counters, a planeswalker sitting high on loyalty, a card that has been fed and now pays you for killing it. Against those targets the gain is substantial, and it converts a defensive spell into a stabilizing one that buys back the tempo the opponent spent building the threat. Against a fresh two-drop with nothing on it, the payout is zero, and the card is a slightly expensive exile that asks for a double-black commitment. That variance is the honest cost of stapling incidental lifegain to hard removal: the reward scales with how threatening the target has become, so the spell is at its best cleaning up something the opponent has already invested in. It is removal that reads the board state and pays out accordingly, a narrower brief than an unconditional kill spell but a more satisfying one when the target is the thing you most needed gone.