Puppet Master

A triple-blue Aura that bounces its host when it dies, with a buy-back tail costing another triple-blue: the rate is dreadful, the color commitment punishing, and the design unmistakably of its moment. What rewards attention is the idea, not the execution. This is an early attempt to bolt a recursion engine onto an Aura, and the death trigger is owner-aligned in a way that quietly limits it: when the enchanted creature dies, the card returns to its owner's hand, not yours, so enchanting an opponent's threat just hands it back to them rather than stealing it. The honest use is on your own creature, where the trigger becomes a soft protection clause: the body returns when it dies, and you can pay another triple-blue to recur the Aura and do it again. That buy-back tail is the tell that the designers knew the engine needed to survive multiple deaths to pay off, then gated it behind a cost steep enough that it would never realistically chain. The card captures the era's willingness to write long, conditional rules text on a chassis whose rate could never support it. The basic notion of an Aura that protects and recurs its host survived into later design; the symmetry, the prohibitive cost, and the recursion gimmick did not. As a card to actually cast, it is a curiosity.