Applied Biomancy

The word "both" is where the value lives. Split into two lines, this is two ordinary effects Simic has printed for years: a modest combat pump on one side, a soft-bounce tempo play on the other, neither worth a card by itself. The modal wording lets you fire one or the other cheaply, but the mode that justifies the slot is the one that does both at once for a single casting. Bounce their attacker while pumping your blocker; return your own creature to reset an enters-the-battlefield trigger while nudging one of your other creatures out of burn range; push through a point of damage in combat while clearing the chump blocker in front of it. That flexibility is the whole design axis: a two-mana instant that answers one thing on a quiet turn and swings a combat step on a busy one, without ever being dead in hand. The pump is deliberately small (a single point of power and toughness, and only until end of turn) so the bounce half stays the reason to run it; a bigger buff would have made this a combat trick that happens to bounce rather than a tempo tool that happens to pump. It reads as filler and plays as glue, the kind of do-a-little-of-two-things instant that Simic keeps returning to because "choose one or both" turns two forgettable halves into one flexible answer.