Quickening Licid

The Licid mechanic is one of Tempest's strangest design experiments: a creature that can spend mana and tap to dissolve itself into an Aura, granting an ability to whatever it attaches to, then later pay white to peel back off and reconstitute as a creature. The cycle was an attempt to build modal permanents before modality had a clean template, and the rules text it produced (a creature that loses its own activated ability in the act of becoming an enchantment) is famously fiddly; the reusable nature of the attachment was the design payoff meant to justify the awkwardness, since paying ends the effect and returns the Licid to creature form, ready to activate its , tap ability again and clamp onto a new target. As a body it is a 1/1 for two mana, so the value was never in combat but in the optionality: a first strike granter that can hop between blockers across multiple turns, or sit back as a chump when you would rather hold a creature than feed an Aura. The trouble is that the rate on the effect was thin even when it was printed; moving first strike from one body to the next as the board shifts asks a lot for what other cards delivered as a static keyword. The Licids are remembered less for what they accomplished than for what they tried to template, a snapshot of a moment when the rules engine was still figuring out how to let a permanent be two things at once.