Narset's Rebuke

The odd part is the payment: five damage at instant speed hands you three mana of a specific color triad the moment it resolves, effectively refunding most of the cost while pointing you toward a Jeskai payoff. That refund reframes what looks like an overpriced kill spell. Five for five is a mediocre rate on its own, but if the is going somewhere useful, the effective cost collapses and the card behaves like a tempo swing rather than a tax. The exile rider is the quiet insurance: anything this kills stays gone, dodging recursion, death triggers, and the graveyard value a plain damage spell would feed. Note the shape of that clause, though. Because the exile is a replacement on death, not a hard removal instruction, the card still has to actually kill the creature first: five damage to an indestructible or regenerating creature deals five damage, the creature does not die, and the exile never fires. This is the reverse of a clean "exile target creature," which ignores those defenses entirely. So the exile rider is best read as anti-recursion tech, not as a way to beat the creatures damage struggles against. The whole design assumes you have somewhere to spend three mana in the same turn, which is why it belongs to decks running fixing and instant-speed follow-ups rather than any deck that just wants a clean answer. Judged as a ritual with a five-damage bolt attached, the math makes sense.