Secure the Scene

White's clean answer to "anything," and the compensation clause is the whole design conversation. Exile is white's premium currency for removal: it beats indestructible, beats death triggers, beats recursion, and hits every nonland permanent type without discrimination. The tax for that reach is a 1/1 Soldier handed to the person you just dealt with, which is white's long-standing habit of leaving the opponent something rather than nothing (the same instinct that gave earlier white removal a life-gain rider or a token for the loser). But the token is the cheaper part of the price. Five mana at sorcery speed does the heavier lifting: this is not a spell you hold up during combat or in response to a game-ending trigger, it is a proactive answer you spend a whole turn casting. That timing constraint keeps a removal spell this unconditional out of the reactive, tempo-driven slots that cheaper conditional removal fills. The token clause reads like a downside, and against the right deck it genuinely is one: exiling a permanent only to gift its controller a fresh body can hand an aggressive board a chump blocker or, worse, a sacrifice-fodder engine one more trigger. But that cost self-corrects against the targets this spell exists for. What five mana buys is certainty, and when the target is a resilient planeswalker, an enchantment nothing else in the color can touch, or an indestructible threat, a 1/1 is a rounding error.