Fleeting Aven

Cycling usually works as a quiet release valve: a card you wish you hadn't drawn becomes a card draw plus a fresh look. This Bird Wizard wires itself directly into that valve, and the wiring runs both ways. Every cycle anyone performs, yours or your opponent's, snaps the bird back to its owner's hand, and the design is honest about what that costs you: bouncing a 2/2 flier with no enter-the-battlefield value means paying again, by hand, to redeploy a body that recoups none of the lost tempo. There is no engine doing the recasting for you. What the trigger actually does is make the creature a barometer for a cycling-saturated board: the more anyone cycles across the table, the more often it leaves combat and the harder it is to keep on offense. The trigger reads off any player, so in a mirror full of cyclers the bird ping-pongs out of your control entirely, the opponent's cycling clawing back your attacker as readily as your own. That is the genuine wrinkle, and it cuts against the deck the rest of the cycling cards want you to build: a flier that the very mechanic you are leaning on keeps sending home. It reads less like a payoff than a deliberately conflicted creature, a small body whose drawback is welded to the archetype's own keyword.