Temporal Spring
Tempo bounce that does not actually bounce: instead of returning the permanent to hand, it buries it one card deep, costing the owner their next draw to replay it. That distinction is the whole engineering. A standard bounce spell trades one card for tempo and hands the opponent their threat back to recast at leisure; this one taxes the recast against the draw step, so the target effectively skips a turn of card flow even though no card was destroyed. It answers anything: a resolved enchantment, an indestructible creature, a planeswalker (in later formats), a land you want gone. Apocalypse was the gold-card set, the expansion built entirely around two-color identities, and this is Simic's contribution to permanent-answering: green's reach into removal it normally lacks, fused with blue's tempo instinct for slowing the clock rather than ending it. The cost of the design is that the target lives. Against a creature with a useful enters-the-battlefield trigger, you are handing the opponent a do-over plus a guaranteed draw of the same card next turn, which is why the effect reads better against permanents that asked real resources to build: an equipped attacker, a flipped land, a payoff that took setup to land. It is a tempo tool that punishes investment, not a clean answer, and the line between those two is exactly where it earns its slot.


