Flight

One mana, one keyword, one creature: the bluntest statement of an evergreen blue design promise, where a single Island makes the ground stop mattering. Alpha printed several auras at this exact rate (one mana, enchant creature, one ability granted), and this is the printing that locked flying in as blue's structural answer to ground stalls. The design does two things at once. It hands evasion to a creature that lacked it, the obvious read; and it prices that evasion cheaply enough that the tempo spent on a spell that is neither a body nor removal is repaid by the first or second connecting hit. That math is what made one-mana evasion auras a recurring blue motif for decades, and why every later attempt to push the slot (stapling a cantrip on, adding a power bonus, granting unblockability instead) begins by pricing itself against the baseline this aura set. It is also the cleanest illustration of why blue owns flying in the color pie: the ability is granted by a spell rather than earned through a creature's printed keyword, and the spell asks for nothing beyond a single mana and the aura's standard liability, the two-for-one you eat when removal kills the host underneath it. Later designs complicated the equation. This one just states the premise.