Relic Ward
A protection Aura with a self-destruct clause baked into its timing. The flash grant is the real mechanism: cast it on your own turn during a main phase and it sticks, granting the enchanted artifact shroud for as long as the Aura stays attached, but cast it reactively (during combat, on an opponent's turn, while a targeted effect is on the stack) and the Aura itself gets sacrificed at the next cleanup. That distinction is the whole design. Used proactively, it is a durable shield you commit ahead of time; used as a panic button, it saves the artifact once, then falls off at end of turn, leaving the artifact alive but bare. You trade the permanence of the protection for the speed of it. This is era-specific design where flash was not a clean keyword but a conditional you paid for with a downside, the kind of fiddly templating that has largely vanished from modern rules language. As artifact-protection technology it is narrow by construction, worth the tempo only when the artifact in question is worth a whole card to defend, and the shroud clause cuts both ways since it also stops you from targeting your own permanent. A relic of mid-nineties enchantment design more than a tool anyone reaches for, but a tidy snapshot of how the rules handled reactive Auras before the vocabulary settled.
