Dragon Mask

A pump effect that hands you the buff and the cost in the same breath: three mana to make a creature bigger, then a forced bounce that erases both the bonus and the body's positional progress once the turn winds down. The design reads as a hedge against the obvious abuse case. A repeatable, fire-it-again combat trick would warp combat math, so the return clause prices each use in tempo: you pay the activation now and the creature's full mana value later, every time, to redeploy whatever you sent back to hand. That clause is the structural valve. It turns a clean pump tool into a payment plan, and the size of each payment scales with the size of what you bounced: a one-drop redeployed for a song, a five-drop a serious tax. The interesting wrinkle is that the bounce is not always a downside. Because the return is a delayed trigger rather than an immediate effect on resolution, it cannot be sandbagged to dodge a removal spell on the stack; the creature stays put until the turn ends. What it does buy is a recast: pointing the activation at a creature with a worthwhile enters-the-battlefield trigger lets you re-buy that trigger when you replay it. (A token, by contrast, simply ceases to exist on the bounce, so the recursion handle only works on real cards.) That double-edged return is the entire identity: a fragile boost for the player who wants raw pump, and a recursion lever for the player who has something worth recurring. As a colorless artifact it asks no color commitment, only the freight, which is the quiet point of so much mid-90s artifact design: effects every color could field, balanced by rates that asked you to really want them.