Sword of Hearth and Home

Every other Sword in the mythic cycle aims its connection payoff at the defender: cards drawn, extra damage, tokens spawned, life drained. This one turns inward. Landing a hit exiles a creature you own and returns it while a basic land arrives untapped alongside, both from a single swing. The exile-and-return is the load-bearing half, because it re-triggers an enters-the-battlefield ability; one attack turns a creature with a strong ETB into a repeatable engine and ramps you at the same time. Note the wording is "own," not "control": if an opponent has stolen one of your creatures, the trigger claws it back home, so the Sword doubles as a soft answer to theft on top of the value loop. The protection from green and from white does the standard cycle work of ducking those colors' removal and their fattest blockers, but ramp stapled to combat damage is the genuine departure. Mana development and swinging in usually belong to different phases and different deck philosophies; this collapses them into one step. What the trigger cannot do is worth marking: it targets a creature already on the battlefield, not one in the graveyard, and it resolves after combat damage, by which point any creature dealt lethal has already died as a state-based action. This is the Sword built to snowball a board you have already committed to, not to rescue one mid-race.