Tibalt's Trickery

The oracle text reads like a counterspell with a punishing rider, but the rider was never the point. Counter target spell is the pretext; the exile clause is the engine, and the fastest way to abuse it is to counter your own cheap spell. Because the effect exiles until it finds a nonland card with a name different from the countered spell, a deck stuffed with copies of one throwaway enabler (a cantrip, a ritual, anything you cast just to counter it) will burn through those matching names and stop on the single differently-named bomb, then cast it free. Aim it at your own spell in a library where the enabler is your only nonland name, and because the exile clause skips lands entirely, the resolution reliably digs past them to the one Emrakul, the one Blightsteel Colossus, the one payoff too expensive to hard-cast, and hands it over at instant speed for two mana. The random bottoming order is cosmetic noise, and the random mill count is a genuine risk, since milling one to three cards can bury your singleton bomb before the exile even begins; the real machine is the name-collision lock, and consistency comes from homogeneity rather than from card quality. This is a combo piece in a counterspell's clothes: the more redundant and interchangeable your deck, the more certain the hit. It belongs to a small tradition of cards whose downside text becomes the payoff once a deck contorts around it, and few reward that contortion this directly.