Balance of Power

A catch-up engine wearing a card-draw spell's clothes. The design is parasitic on the opponent's hand size: it draws nothing when you are ahead, refunds you exactly the gap when you are behind, and pays the most precisely when you have been ground down to empty and the opponent is sitting on a full grip. Building the payout to scale only with the deficit is the whole trick. The card is meant to be a dead draw in the matchups where you do not need it and a small Ancestral Recall in the matchups where you are losing, which is a clean way to put a powerful effect into a beginner-facing product without printing an unconditional five-mana draw spell. The Portal lineage matters here: simplified templating and no instant-speed tricks were the rule across the whole product, so the sorcery-speed limit is less a balance lever than a constraint imposed on everything in the set. The result is a draw spell that rewards falling behind, an inversion of the usual logic where card advantage compounds for the player already ahead. It asks you to read the game state honestly before you cast it, because against an empty hand it does precisely nothing.