Lantern Spirit

For a single blue mana, this 2/1 flier picks itself up and walks off the battlefield at instant speed, and that escape hatch is the entire design. Point removal has nowhere to land: respond to the spell on the stack by bouncing, and the answer fizzles against an empty target. Sweepers and combat math both have to plan around a flier that simply will not stay still, because next turn it recasts and starts swinging again. The price of that resilience is tempo, paid in full each time. Every bounce wipes the board state clean back to a fresh three-mana cast, so the loop is a defensive lever you pull at a cost, never a free reset; the turn you spend rebuilding is a turn you are not pressuring anyone. The self-bounce is double-edged in another way worth naming: returning to hand sends any attached Auras to the graveyard and erases counters entirely, so this is a body you want to keep clean rather than load up, the opposite of an enchantment carrier. What it does reward is anything that triggers when a creature enters, since each recast is a reusable on-demand trigger. This is an early-era expression of blue's tempo-and-evasion identity at its most distilled: a small evasive threat whose evasion is doubled by the ability to vanish from any answer pointed at it, chipping away while staying just out of reach.