Forgotten Lore

Regrowth returns the card you want; this hands the picking to your opponent and then makes you bid for the privilege of overruling them. The mechanism is the whole point. Your opponent's job is to offer the worst card in your graveyard, and the only way to claw toward your actual target is to keep paying until they run out of bad options to point at. That inverts the usual incentive completely: a bloated graveyard works against you, because every dud is another payment standing between you and your prize, while a lean graveyard is the cheaper one, since with few cards on offer the opponent is forced toward your target almost immediately. So the spell scales not with the power of what you want back but with how indifferent you are to the outcome. A graveyard stuffed with cards you would happily retrieve shortens the auction; a single buried jewel surrounded by junk makes it expensive. The donated-agency lever (letting the opponent assign, distribute, or choose against your interest) shows up later in cards where opponents split counters or assign damage; here it governs recursion, an unusual place to put it. The result is a green tutor whose price is set by your own greed, which is exactly why it has stayed a footnote in the decades since: most recursion players want one specific card, and this is the one recursion spell that punishes them for it.