Trusted Advisor

The drawback reads like a punishment and plays like a payoff. A blue creature returning to your hand every upkeep is the trigger a flicker-value deck wants to exploit, not avoid: point it at a body whose arrival matters and the forced return becomes a recurring engine rather than a tax, with the Advisor itself serving as a legal target when nothing better is on board. The two-card boost to maximum hand size is the quieter half, a nod to the fortune-telling, draw-heavy blue deck that hoards options and needs room to hold them; a card that cares about the ceiling on your hand at all is rare enough to be a deckbuilding hint rather than a stat. What holds the design together is that both abilities point at the same archetype. A controlling blue deck leaning on enters-the-battlefield value and accumulated cards wants the bounce and the larger hand for the same reason; a beatdown deck wants neither, which is why a 1/2 for one was never priced as a threat. It is a build-around dressed as a common, the rare cheap blue body whose text only makes sense once you have decided what you are going to abuse it with.