Expel from Orazca
Most bounce spells settle for resetting the board: send a threat back to hand, buy a turn, accept that the opponent gets to recast it. This one offers a conditional upgrade that turns a tempo card into something closer to soft removal. Meet the ascend threshold (ten permanents, a count that rewards go-wide and token strategies flooding the board anyway) and the bounce graduates from hand to top of library, costing the opponent their entire next draw to replay the thing you targeted. The escalation is the whole design. Without the city's blessing it is a two-mana hand-return at instant speed, fine but unremarkable; with it, the tempo swing roughly doubles, since the opponent loses a turn of development on top of the recast. The trick is that ascend asks for permanents, not lands or creatures specifically, so the decks most likely to clear ten are also the decks that least need a one-for-one bounce. There sits the tension: the spell peaks in the shells that want it least, since it rewards a board state you have already built rather than one this card helps build. That is the honest cost of the city's blessing as a mechanic, and it stops the card short of being a strict improvement on ordinary bounce.
