Fleeting Image

The bounce ability is the whole pitch: a flyer that pulls itself back to hand for a single blue and a generic, dodging any removal aimed at it before it resolves. That self-bounce is the card's escape hatch, and the Illusion creature type is the honest tell. Illusions in this era traded raw toughness for trickery, bodies that gave you an out-clause instead of a stat line, and this one writes its exit straight into the rules box. The 2/1 body is what you pay for that flexibility: the toughness is low enough to die to almost anything, which is precisely why the designers handed it a way to leave the board before the answer connects. What keeps the rate fair is that the bounce is repeatable but never free; every dodge costs mana and a tempo beat, returning the creature to your hand to be recast at sorcery speed, so you are spending a full turn cycle to reset an evasive clock. The same return strips anything attached: Auras fall off to the graveyard, counters vanish, which makes the ability a survival meter rather than a recursion engine, converting spare blue into resilience instead of recycling enchantments or payoffs. It is the textbook self-protecting flyer, a clean evasive threat that simply refuses to sit still long enough to eat a removal spell.