From Under the Floorboards

Madness usually cuts a corner: cheat a card down a turn early, pay less for the same effect, take the discount and move on. This one runs the mechanic backwards. Hardcast at its printed cost, it delivers a fixed package: three tapped Zombies and three life, a flat sorcery-speed payoff. Discard it, though, and the whole spell collapses into a single variable, X tokens and X life scaled off whatever you feed the on the way out of your hand. The dial only pays above breakeven. Pay exactly five through madness and X equals three, the same three-Zombie result you would have gotten by casting it from the front. The reward lives in the sixth, seventh, eighth mana you can pour past that line. That makes this less a discard payoff than a mana sink with a discard cost, and the version that matters wants a repeatable discard outlet plus a base deep enough to feed a large X once the card sits in exile. Sorcery timing is no obstacle: nothing about paying the madness cost hinges on combat, so an outlet that only fires on your main phase serves fine. Without the engine it is a clunky, overcosted token spell. With it, the discard that usually reads as loss becomes the multiplier on a flood of bodies.