Skywing Aven
The discard-to-bounce ability is built to feed a madness shell, but it does the job by sacrificing tempo rather than supplying it. The era's blue-black discard decks wanted to throw cards away on their own terms: pitch a spell with madness, cast it for its madness cost in response, and turn a discard outlet into a mana discount. Most enablers around it were one-shot looters or rummagers that committed nothing to the board. This one couples the discard to an evasive 2/1, so the same activation that triggers a madness card also clears the Bird off the battlefield. That is the catch the design accepts: returning it to hand is not a cheap reload but a hard reset. To attack again you have to recast it for and wait out summoning sickness, which means activating the ability mid-combat trades a swing now for a card pitched and a creature parked in hand. The bounce reads less as a repeatable engine and more as a survival valve, a way to dodge a bad block or an instant-speed removal spell while squeezing a madness trigger out of the same motion. It is the deliberately taxed version of a free discard outlet: every use costs a card, costs the board presence, and costs the mana to redeploy. The payoff is the madness interaction; the price is that the Aven never lingers as a reliable threat once you start firing it.


