Skyclave Apparition
The mana-value cap is where the design does its real thinking. Exiling a nonland, nontoken permanent with mana value 4 or less lets one white three-drop answer nearly the entire early game (creatures, artifacts, planeswalkers, enchantments) without touching lands or tokens, and exile means no death trigger, no recursion, no bounce-back. What separates it from clean removal like Journey to Nowhere is the leave-the-battlefield clause: kill the Apparition, blink it, or bounce it, and the exiled card's owner creates an X/X Illusion sized to whatever left. That token is the honest half of the deal, but it is not a refund. The exile is permanent; the owner never gets the original card back, only a vanilla body scaled to what they lost. That distinction runs the whole engine. Exiling a four-drop hands back a 4/4, so the more valuable the target, the larger the consolation prize if the Apparition dies, and the value ceiling polices itself. Flicker synergy cuts both ways here, which is unusual for an enters-the-battlefield removal creature; most want to be blinked freely, but this one forces a running tally of whether re-triggering the enter clause is worth surrendering the previous exile as a token. It reads as a Kor hatebear with an exile stapled on, but the departure clause turns it into a genuinely interactive removal engine rather than a strictly-better catch-all.
