Shimmering Wings

Granting flying for a single blue is the least interesting thing this Aura does. The reason it exists is the line below it: spend one more blue and the wings come back to your hand, ready to replay. That recurring buyback turns a cheap utility enchantment into a reusable resource. You recast it turn after turn, you save it by bouncing in response to removal aimed at the creature wearing it, and in a deck that counts blue spells cast (or counts the same card hitting the stack repeatedly) you loop it as an engine cog. The Aura can stay a permanent as long as its host survives, and you can choose to send it home; it does not trade permanence for flexibility, it carries both. The cost is the brake: each recast spends a mana and demands a fresh window to be worthwhile, so the loop only pays off when a replay buys something past the flying itself. That is why it reads as filler until you find a reason to recur it. It comes from an era when blue leaned hard into tempo and recurring value, and it is a small artifact of that philosophy: a spell built to be cast more than once. The idea of an Aura that buys itself back has resurfaced in various shapes since, but few state it as cleanly as this early version does.