Baral's Expertise

Bounce is the effect blue leans on hardest when it wants to touch the stack and the board in one gesture, and the Expertise cycle's blue slot bends that instinct toward tempo. Returning up to three artifacts and/or creatures resets a board the turn before you crash through it, but the more deliberate reading is picking up your own permanents for their enters triggers, then chaining into the free half. That free half is conditional, not guaranteed: it casts a spell of mana value 4 or less from your hand, so it does nothing if you have no eligible spell to deploy, and it develops your side from hand rather than pulling anything directly onto the battlefield. The mana value restriction is what keeps the follow-up from spiraling; it gates you out of the splashiest payoffs and asks you to build a curve where the spell you most want to play happens to live under that line. Every member of the cycle marries an effect to a free spell of capped cost, but blue's is the one where both halves manipulate position rather than resources, which is why the sequencing matters so much. Five mana to bounce three permanents and cast something for nothing is a large swing for one card, and the design accepts that by making the payoff depend on your grip: the deck that sequences its bounce targets and its free cast as a single play gets the whole card, and the deck holding it with an empty hand gets a slow, expensive bounce spell.