Threads of Disloyalty

Blue is the color of permanent theft, and this Aura sits inside that lineage as a deliberately narrowed instrument. Where Control Magic and Treachery take anything they can enchant and never give it back, this one accepts a hard mana-value gate in exchange for a cheaper cost and a tighter target: nothing worth more than two ever crosses the table. That ceiling reads as punishing until you account for what lives at the bottom of an aggressive curve. Mana dorks, one-drop beaters, hatebears, the small efficient threats that have already decided games by the time the midgame arrives: those are precisely the creatures this is built to repossess, flipping a clock from one side of the board to the other for three mana. The template is its own quiet decision. A sacrifice-then-reanimate steal would launder the creature through the graveyard, out of reach of enchantment removal; this is durable ownership that stays tethered to a fragile object. It survives the end step but shares the creature's fate, and it answers to anything that strips Auras. Permanent control bound to a removable attachment is the bargain at the heart of the design: you keep the prize rather than borrowing it, but the prize comes leashed to an object an opponent can pop. The mana-value cap is the toll paid for that durability, and it is what distinguishes this from the cost-agnostic enchant-steal effects that take whatever they like.