Soothing of Sméagol

Bounce spells have always been priced against their downside: they trade a card and answer nothing permanently, buying only a turn. Unsummon set the floor at one mana with no strings, and everything since has negotiated from there. This one asks for two mana and a nontoken restriction, then bolts on a mechanic that reframes the whole trade: each cast advances your accrued Ring benefits, laying a repeatable value engine on top of what would otherwise be pure tempo. That changes the math on when you want to cast it. A conventional bounce spell is a reactive tool you hold for the right window; here the incentive tilts toward using it, even proactively, since sitting on it means leaving progress on the table. The nontoken clause is what keeps the price honest: a bounce spell that could hit tokens would double as hard removal, since a bounced token ceases to exist and never returns. Capping the target to nontoken creatures denies the spell the two-mana kill it would otherwise get against a token army. What you are really buying is a tempo play that also feeds a longer engine, which is a genuinely different card than a bounce spell that only sets an opponent back a turn.