Ill-Gotten Gains
A mass discard dressed up as a fair trade, and the dressing is the whole con. Both players ditch their hands and pull three cards back from the yard, which scans as a neutral reset until you remember that the caster chose this turn and the opponent did not. Recursion combo decks loaded their graveyards on purpose, then used the discard as a refueling step: dump a dead hand, retrieve the exact three pieces needed to chain into a kill, while the opponent reloads with whatever they happened to lose along the way. The self-exile clause is the leash. Because the spell removes itself on resolution, it gives you the reanimation toolbox once and then walks away, which is what separated it from the truly degenerate Yawgmoth's Will engines of its era: a one-shot ritual, not a loop you could grind. That single-use restriction forces a decisive turn rather than incremental advantage, and the skill is in timing the discard against a graveyard you stocked deliberately, so the symmetrical wording feeds your returns while it merely scrambles theirs. It is a black design idiom executed cleanly: an effect that looks like a mirror across the table and behaves like a one-way door, balanced only for the player who built around the fallout.
