The Princess Takes Flight
Chapter one blinks a creature away, chapter three brings it back two turns later, and read cold this looks like a removal spell that undoes its own work. The trick is whose creature you target. Aim chapter one at an opposing threat and you get a two-turn stall that hands the enemy their creature back on schedule, which is rarely worth the tempo. Aim it at your own creature and the Saga becomes protection stretched across a full lore cycle: a blocker tucked away ahead of a wrath, a value creature flickered to re-fire its enter-the-battlefield trigger, a threat parked safely offstage while the coast clears. Because Sagas are cast at sorcery speed, none of this is reactive; the sequencing is planned a turn or two ahead, and tokens are off the table since an exiled token ceases to exist and never returns on chapter three. Chapter two, the +2/+2 and flying, patches the awkward gap: with nothing new on the battlefield to show for the investment, it turns some other creature into a clock while the exiled one waits. The design lives in that delay. Ordinary flicker effects resolve on the spot; this one holds the permanent in exile through the opponent's turns, which is both the cost (they see it coming back) and the payoff (nothing on the battlefield can touch it while it sits). It is a self-contained tempo swing that doubles as insurance, and reading it as removal is the most common way to waste it.
