Corrupting Licid

The Licid mechanic is one of the strangest design experiments of its era: a creature that can detach part of itself and reattach as an Aura, then peel back off again if you want the body returned. The rules engine never quite knew what to do with it, which is why these cards carry some of the most contorted templating of any cycle ever printed. The interesting design tension lives in that pay-to-detach clause. Most Auras are commitments; once enchanted, you stay enchanted. Here the attachment is reversible, so the card becomes a movable evasion grant rather than a permanent one, sliding fear from one attacker to another across turns or retreating to a 2/2 body when the granted creature is about to die. That flexibility is the whole pitch, because the raw rate (a body plus a repeatable evasion enchantment) is otherwise unremarkable. The Licids were Wizards trying to answer "what if a creature could become an equipment-like effect" years before Equipment existed as a card type, and the awkwardness of that answer is exactly why the mechanic was never revisited. Read it less as a finished tool and more as the kind of prototype that taught the design team why a cleaner solution was needed; the eventual arrival of Equipment and modular evasion granting did the same job without the rules headaches that detaching and reattaching a creature-turned-Aura created at every step.