Yamabushi's Flame

The exile rider is what earns this its slot. Three damage to any target at instant speed was, by the era it appeared, a known quantity: a touch overcosted against the cheaper red burn that came before it. The clause that distinguishes it is keyed not to the moment of damage but to the entire turn that follows. Any creature touched by these three points gets exiled rather than dying, and the replacement does not care whether the flame itself delivers the killing blow. Chip a creature for three, finish it with a blocker or a second spell, and it still leaves the game instead of reaching the graveyard. That conditional exile does quiet but specific work: it denies the recursion engines that would buy a creature back, and it shuts off the death triggers that fire on the way to the yard. In a red deck, that turns a fair removal spell into a clean answer to the threats fair removal usually struggles with: the persist creature, the graveyard-value engine, the thing that wants to die. The effect is a replacement contingent on the creature actually dying, so an indestructible or regenerated body that merely survives lethal damage never qualifies; but if that same creature would die another way later this turn, it is exiled all the same. That is the line between this and a spell that simply removes a permanent: it is burn first, with an insurance policy stapled to anything it marks, and the policy is the part that aged better than the rate.