Chain to Memory

The -4/-0 tells you exactly what kind of interaction this is: not removal, but a surgical strike on combat math that lasts precisely one turn. It touches nothing but power, so a big attacker gets defanged while its body stays whole, and by end of turn the creature is back to full. The scope is what boxes it in: one creature, no kills, no answer to a wide board. But the "combat trick" label cuts both ways. Subtract four from a 2/1 and it deals nothing, sure, but the more valuable line is often defensive in the other direction: shrink the incoming attacker enough that your smaller blocker survives and trades up, turning a would-be chump into a clean one-for-one. Read that way, the card selection is not compensation for card disadvantage so much as a bonus riding on top of a real exchange. The scry 2 reorders your next two draws and buries the chaff you do not want, which is the sweetener that makes a marginal defensive spell worth a slot. Just be clear about the constraint that never goes away: it needs a legal creature to target. Against an empty board it does nothing and sits dead in hand, so the scry cannot be summoned on demand as pure smoothing. This is the concession blue makes when it would rather bend combat than counter or bounce the threat outright: a stopgap that occasionally buys the turn you needed, wearing a card-selection ribbon.