Nurturing Licid

The Licids were Tempest's attempt to answer a structural problem with Auras: once a creature enchantment hits the battlefield it sits there committed, and removing the host strips the value entirely. The Licid template solves this by letting the enchantment be a creature first and an Aura only when you choose, then letting you pay a small cost to peel it back off and return it to creature form. That toggle is the whole design idea. Most Auras are a one-way commitment; this one is reusable, repositionable, and dodges the classic two-for-one of killing the enchanted creature with the Aura still attached, because you can detach it in response. The ability it carries while attached, repeatable regeneration for one green mana, is modest by intent: the payoff is mobility, not raw power. The cost structure does the balancing, since activating the attach ability taps the Licid and demands green every time it moves. The Licids were a clever, fiddly mechanic that never spawned a real archetype, partly because the layered rules interactions of a creature that becomes an Aura and back proved harder to template cleanly than the play pattern justified. What remains is a snapshot of mid-1990s design willing to chase an elegant idea (an Aura you can pick up again) through genuinely awkward rules text to get there.