Sheltered by Ghosts

Two mana buys an answer and a threat folded together, and the sleight of hand is that the answer rides on the threat. The exile clause reads like Banishing Light or Oblivion Ring, but where those effects are stand-alone permanents that must be dealt with directly, this one hangs its exile off a creature you already control. The removal and the buffed body share a single permanent and a single point of failure: kill or bounce the enchanted creature and the exiled nonland permanent comes right back. That coupling is exactly what makes the ward 2 matter. It is not merely protecting a lifelinking attacker; it is guarding the prison, taxing attempts to remove the creature and unwind the two-for-one you got on cast. Read that way, the +1/+0 and the lifelink become almost incidental, sweeteners on a package whose real job is to handle a blocker or a bomb and then dare the opponent to overpay for the reclaim. The tradeoff Aura-anchored effects have always carried is that the host is a target: destroy it and the buff, the exile, and the removed permanent all unravel at once. This design does not close that seam, and does not pretend to. It just prices the recovery. The vulnerability is still there; pulling on it costs the opponent more than two mana of removal should, and often more than the traded permanent is worth.