Cerulean Sphinx

A 5/5 flyer wants to commit to the battlefield and finish the game; this one is built to flee it. For a single blue mana, the owner can shuffle the Sphinx back into their library at instant speed, an escape hatch that exists for one purpose: when a removal spell or sacrifice edict has it in the crosshairs, the target vanishes and the threat resets for a later draw. The opponent spends a card to kill nothing. That self-protection is real, but the cost is the tempo of recasting six mana from scratch, which is exactly why the Sphinx never settled into a home. The body wants to attack now; the bailout only earns its keep when something is already trying to end it, and a control deck rarely wants its top-end leaving combat to dodge an edict it could have answered some other way. The shuffle clause does pull double duty as deck-smoothing, returning a known threat to the library rather than letting it sit in a graveyard, which suits a shell that prizes a recurring finisher over a single committed one. As a piece of early blue design it reads more like an experiment than a staple: a creature handed an instant-speed answer to its own mortality, and the quiet acknowledgment that sometimes the best play with a six-mana flyer is to take it back.