Illusionist's Stratagem

The blink instant that scales with how much you commit to it. The exile-and-return shape does the standard work of its era's flicker effects: it untaps the targeted creatures, sidesteps targeted removal sitting on the stack, and re-triggers every enters-the-battlefield ability (the creatures return as new objects, so they arrive with summoning sickness, which is the one thing flicker does not paper over). The leaner one-creature versions ask you to pick a single target and hope it earns the mana; this one hits up to two and folds in a card to soften the tempo hit. Because the targeting is optional, the floor is a four-mana cantrip that can pull a single creature out of a kill spell at instant speed; the ceiling is doubling a pair of value bodies' entry triggers in one window. The price is the tell. Four mana to flicker your own creatures and draw a card is steep if those creatures generate nothing on entry, so the spell only earns its slot in a board built around enters-the-battlefield value rather than as a lean protection tool. That narrowness is the cost of the rider: the cantrip and the second target push it away from cheaper, single-purpose blink instants and toward decks that want to flicker an engine, not just dodge a removal spell. Cast with zero targets it is simply a four-mana draw spell, which confirms it was designed for the upside, not the safety valve.