Hidden Ancients
Two mana buys a wager, not a creature: an inert enchantment that pays out only if your opponent obliges by casting an enchantment of their own. When they do, the buried thing cracks open into a 5/5 Treefolk that dwarfs what you spent on it. When they never do, you have paid for a permanent that watches the board and waits in vain. This is the conditional-payoff template that an early "hidden" cycle indulged across several cheap enchantments, each lying in ambush for one category of spell. The clause that lifts it above a parlor trick is the intervening-if check baked into the trigger: the trap has to survive in its dormant form right up to resolution, and the moment it animates into a Treefolk it stops listening for future enchantments altogether. The strategic axis is information, not raw power. Against an opponent who runs few enchantments it sits dead; against one who leans on them it converts a small outlay into a body that vastly outclasses the cost. There is no middle outcome, and that binary is the entire proposition. The card punishes a known opponent rather than performing on its own merits, which is why its value collapses to a single question: do you already know what you are sitting across from?
