Wanderer's Strike

Unconditional exile of any creature is a premium effect, the kind white historically reserves for cards priced well below this one. The five-mana rate reads as a deliberate tax, and the proliferate rider is what pays it back: bolting a counter-advancement clause onto an already-clean answer folds the removal into a plan rather than leaving it as a standalone kill. That pairing is what justifies looking past the cost. Exile a blocker and push a Planeswalker's loyalty a turn closer, or advance a poison counter, a +1/+1 stack, or an energy reserve in the same breath you resolve the removal. The design belongs to an era organized around loyalty counters, where a spell that answered a threat while nudging your own board upward earned its slot by doing two jobs from one card. Divorced from a deck actively counting counters, it is overcosted exile that cheaper white spells outclass; welded to one, it turns a reactive card into a proactive one without asking you to draw a second piece. That conditionality is the honest read: the sorcery-speed clause and the steep price mean it never functions as a tempo play, only as a value play, and only where the counters it proliferates are already doing work.