Resculpt
Removal that hands the opponent a body is a design gamble blue keeps returning to, and this is the tuning that makes it worth two mana: exile, which sidesteps death triggers, indestructibility, and graveyard recursion, in exchange for a 4/4 the exiled permanent's controller gets to keep. Pointed at your own permanent, the trade reads differently. This becomes a rescue button, saving a creature from a kill spell mid-response and replacing it with a hefty (if evasion-free) token, or cashing a spent artifact in for a beater. The 4/4 is the honest cost, and it is never nothing: even against an aggressive board it is a real body you are handing an opponent, so the calculus is always whether answering their permanent is worth arming them with a fresh 4/4. Because it is an instant, the caster is the one who decides that math, and at the moment of their choosing: you commit only once the swap favors you. Polymorph effects that transform one permanent into another have a long lineage in blue, but most were sorcery-speed gambles on a random result. This narrows that idea into a clean, deterministic answer with a fixed downside, trading the randomness for a token you can size up before you cast. The result reads as removal but plays as a negotiation over who benefits from the swap.




