Elvish Fury

The whole point of this card sits in the gap between its two prices. One green mana buys a temporary +2/+2, the sort of pump effect that fills out a creature deck and gets forgotten the moment it resolves. Buyback reframes it: pay four more and the spell returns to hand instead of the graveyard, converting a one-shot ambush into a recurring mana sink for the late game, when a green deck has flooded the board and run out of better uses for its excess lands. That four-mana premium is the design discipline. It is steep enough relative to a +2/+2 that you almost never cash it in early, which keeps the rate honest while leaving the option there for a stalled board. Buyback was the marquee mechanic of its set, and most of the cycle stapled the keyword to effects genuinely worth recasting: a counter, a bounce, a kill spell. A pump trick sits at the humble end of that family, deliberately so. The interest here is structural rather than powerful: it shows buyback scaling down to a commons-tier effect as cleanly as it scales up to bombs, a demonstration that the mechanic survives being attached to something modest. The card is less a player than a proof of concept, a study in how a recursion tax behaves when the thing being recurred barely justifies the math.