Time Elemental
Bouncing a permanent on a creature body was a strange place to put the effect in 1994, and the design knows it: the rate is aggressive (three mana to deploy, four to activate, repeatable), so the card is loaded with friction in every other direction. The body is a 0/2 that cannot meaningfully attack or block, because doing either sacrifices it and burns its controller for five. The activation costs four mana, double-blue, and a tap, which means the turn you bounce something is the turn you do nothing else. And the targeting restriction (any permanent that isn't enchanted) is a quiet acknowledgement that the designers understood exactly how powerful repeatable bounce would be if it scaled cleanly, and chose to gate it behind an aura-shaped lock. What survives is a puzzle box: a soft permission engine welded to a self-immolating chump blocker, sold at a rate that looks reasonable until you try to use any one piece of it independently. It stands as a clear artifact of a design discipline that was still mapping which knobs on a card actually carry weight and which restrictions do the load-bearing work; the answer here turned out to be the combat clause, which is why repeatable bounce on a creature has been priced very differently every time it has been revisited since.





