Galepowder Mage

The flicker on attack is the whole trick: every swing exiles a creature and returns it at the beginning of the next end step, which strips the body in front of it for the entire combat. That reads as temporary removal, but the timing window is the design's real edge. The trigger fires on declaration of attack, before blockers are chosen, so a wall that would have stopped the swing simply vanishes before it can be assigned to anything. Send the Mage at an open board and it answers nothing; send it into a defender and that defender is gone until the opponent has already lost the block. The forced return blunts it as permanent removal, but the same clause points the other way: aim the trigger at a friendly creature with a worthwhile arrival effect, and the attack step becomes a repeatable engine that reuses that trigger every time you declare it (the exile-and-return never sends anything to the graveyard, so this is flicker value, not sacrifice value). White's blink tradition has spent years refining this exact axis, but stapling the abuse to an attack trigger ties it to a 3/3 flier that has to survive a turn and commit to combat to do anything at all. No defensive use, no instant-speed save: just a recurring offer whose worth is set by combat math and the board you bring to it.