Lightning Reflexes

Point this at a creature mid-combat and it works exactly like a pump-and-first-strike trick: +1/+0 and first strike land in time to swing a block, and then the Aura sacrifices itself at the next cleanup step, so the two mana buys a one-shot ambush rather than a permanent attachment. Cast it at sorcery speed instead and the self-destruct clause never fires, leaving an ordinary Aura riveted to the creature. That makes the card modal on timing alone: the same two mana buys either a disposable combat trick or a permanent buff, decided entirely by when you point it. The design idiom is an artifact of its era: a flash-enabled Aura engineered to mimic an instant without anyone printing the instant. The flash permission and the suicide rider are bolted onto the enchant template, and the player is left to track the cleanup-step sacrifice by hand. Later sets simply stopped doing this, handing out first strike and a power bump on a plain instant that resolves once and asks nothing of the cleanup step. What remains visible here is the seam, the exact moment designers chose to fake a combat trick out of Aura parts rather than write the trick directly, and the rules bookkeeping that the modern version quietly folded into a single resolution.