Semester's End

A blink spell that grows what it saves. Most flicker effects trade the value of a reset (dodging removal, retriggering an enters-the-battlefield ability) against the tempo cost of leaving your permanents off the board for a turn; here the exile clause is scoped to your own creatures and planeswalkers only, which turns the safety valve into a proactive tool. You can hold this at instant speed to blink a board out from under a wrath, then reland it end of turn with every creature one counter larger and every planeswalker one loyalty higher. That the returned planeswalkers come back with an extra loyalty counter is the quiet detail: it lets you refresh a walker that has already spent its arrival ability, resetting it to its starting loyalty with a bonus counter on top. The four-mana price is the cost of doing all of this at once and at instant speed, which is where the card diverges from the usual single-target flickers that price themselves for one creature at a time. Blink has always been a reactive keyword wearing the costume of a value engine; scoping the targets to your side and stapling on permanent growth makes it honestly both, a fog-adjacent defensive play and a slow accumulation of stats folded into the same instant.