Reject

The Mana Leak template with a narrower target and a sharper knife. Where the classic soft counter taxes any spell for three, this one only stops creatures and planeswalkers, and in exchange for that restriction it hangs an exile clause off the counter. The trade is deliberate: give up the flexibility to answer a burn spell or a board wipe, and you gain permanent removal of a threat that would otherwise sit in the graveyard waiting for recursion. That exile line is the real design argument. Against decks built to rebuy their bombs (reanimator shells, eternalize creatures, anything that mines the yard for a second wave of monsters), a countered creature that lands in the graveyard is only half-dead. Sending it to exile closes the loop. The tax keeps it honest as a two-mana answer: it is a tempo tool that gets worse the longer a game runs, since a caster with mana to spare simply pays through it. So the card wants to be cast on the turn the threat lands, ideally when the opponent has tapped low to deploy it. It answers a specific fear (the resilient, recurring creature) at the cost of the universal coverage a hard counter or a Mana Leak provides, and that tension between narrowness and permanence is the whole pitch.