Alchemist's Greeting

Five mana for four damage to a creature is a rate no constructed deck wants to pay at face value, and that is the point: the madness cost is the real card, and the sticker price exists mostly to be ignored. Discard it to a rummaging effect, a looter, or a hand-size trigger, and it fires for , a number that reads as efficient burn against most early threats. The design lives entirely in the gap between those two costs, rewarding decks built to feed cards into the bin rather than play them from hand. What makes the structure clean is the timing: madness casts on the trigger that follows the discard, so the spell goes off at the moment you ditch it, instant-speed if the discard happened at instant speed. That turns a clunky sorcery into a combat trick whenever the discard outlet cooperates, letting you hold up removal disguised as a do-nothing card in hand. It is a member of the discard-payoff school where the card's worst-case cost is deliberately punitive to push you toward the synergy, the same lever that animates the better-known madness removal of its color. On its own it is overcosted; inside a deck that treats the graveyard as a second hand, it is a flexible answer that costs almost nothing to deploy.