Reality Shift

The cleanest premium removal blue ever got, and the rider is what makes that defensible. Exile sidesteps every regeneration, indestructibility, and recursion trick that softer removal trips over, which is the kind of unconditional answer blue rarely earns the right to print. Manifest is the tax: the controller of the exiled creature replaces it with a face-down 2/2, so the spell trades their threat for a body rather than leaving them empty-handed. That body is rarely a wash. A general's death-trigger value, a fattened bomb, a creature wearing equipment or counters all collapse into a vanilla 2/2 that may not even be a creature card underneath, and the controller has spent nothing to get it. The design tension is honest: blue is paying for exile-grade removal by handing the opponent a card they did not ask for and cannot always upgrade, while the caster pays only the two mana and accepts that they have not netted card advantage. It is also one of the few cards where manifest's "face up for its mana cost" clause rarely helps its owner, since the opponent seldom wants the random thing they flipped over. As instant-speed exile, it answers a creature mid-combat or in response to an activated ability, which is where the rate stops looking like a fair trade and starts looking like a steal.