Chain of Smog

The Chain cycle is built on escalation: each copy ricochets to a new player or permanent, and the table watches the spell spread until someone declines to continue. This one inverts the politics. Hand the discard to an opponent and yes, they shed two cards, but the obvious target for the copy they get to make is you, which is why for over a decade it read as an unplayable curiosity: a discard spell that hands your opponent the choice of stripping your own hand right back. The functional wrinkle is the doubled "may." Both the copy and the retarget are optional, so a single resolution can be aimed at yourself and copied back at yourself, two discards at a time, repeating each time you elect to keep the chain going. By itself that is an ornate way to throw your own hand into the graveyard and walk away with nothing. The interaction that rescued it is not a discard payoff but a copy payoff: a Magecraft creature like Witherbloom Apprentice, which triggers whenever you cast or copy a spell, turns each link of the chain into a point of drain. The loop is finite only on paper, because the discard clause stops mattering once your hand empties; what makes it lethal is the copy event firing again and again while the trigger keeps draining. A combo piece masquerading as filler, with a competitive identity written years after print by an interaction the original design never saw coming.