Vapor Snag

Unsummon with a price attached, and that single point of life is what turns a tempo wash into a clock. Bouncing a creature is fundamentally tempo-neutral over a long game: the threat comes back, the mana gets respent, and nothing dies. The life loss converts that wasted turn into a permanent dent. For an aggressive tempo deck that already plans to win before the opponent can rebuild, one life off the top every time you reset their board adds up into lethal range, and it does so at instant speed, meaning you can return a blocker mid-combat, save your own creature from a removal spell, or simply send something home the turn before it would have stabilized them. It is a clean illustration of how blue tempo math works: the bounce buys the window, and the incidental drain usually makes sure the window closes on the opponent rather than reopening. The drain also rescues the card from being pure card-disadvantage bounce (you spend a card to make them recast one), which only earns its place when the tempo swing is doing the killing. The cost cuts the other way when you bounce your own creature to dodge removal: there you eat the life loss yourself, trading a point of life for a saved card. That asymmetry is exactly why it lives in decks that race rather than in control shells that want to trade resources evenly.