Aether Adept

Tempo distilled into a creature. The bounce-on-entry template was nothing new when this arrived: Man-o'-War had been pairing the effect with a body for years, stapling a Boomerang to a blocker so the bounce came attached to permanent board presence rather than vanishing as a one-shot spell. What this version does is hand the trick to a Human Wizard, a creature type that has carried tribal payoffs across many sets, and keep the 2/2 modest so the rate stays honest. The exchange is the whole pitch: spend a card and three mana to undo an opponent's creature spell while developing your own board, banking a tempo swing rather than a permanent answer. The bounce is temporary by design, and that temporariness is where the card asks for judgment. Against a vanilla beater it buys exactly one turn, since the creature comes right back; against something the opponent paid a steep cost to deploy, it forces a second hard-cast, taxing their mana even as the threat returns. The flip side is the obvious trap: bouncing something with a valuable enters-the-battlefield trigger hands the controller a free reuse, so the bounce is a liability against the very creatures it most wants to remove. The same impermanence that limits its reach makes the body reusable on your side: flicker or reanimate it and the single bounce becomes repeatable, the design's intended cap turned into an engine once a deck builds around it.