Growth Cycle

A pump spell that scales off its own copies is a joke design most of the time, and the joke has a punchline written into the rate: the base +3/+3 is a fine trick on its own, but every additional Growth Cycle in your graveyard adds another +2/+2, which means the card quietly asks you to run four and cast the first three at a loss to make the fourth backbreaking. That is the whole gag. The self-referential scaling is a common-rarity conceit that occasionally surfaces in core-era printings: a card whose ceiling is only reachable if you have already committed to a plan nobody would build around outside a stunt. Played straight, the front half does honest work as a two-mana combat trick, big enough to win a fight or push lethal at instant speed. Played to its promise, it rewards a graveyard stacked with prior casts, which no functional deck actually assembles. The design's charm is that both halves are true at once: a reasonable trick with a comically inflated engine mode bolted on top, priced so the engine never quite pays.