Hooting Mandrills

Delve is what makes the printed cost a fiction. On its face this is a six-mana 4/4 with trample, a body no one builds toward; in practice, in any deck that fills a graveyard, the melts away one exiled card at a time, and the floor turns into a green Ape for as little as when the yard is deep enough. That conversion is the whole design: graveyard cards stop being spent resources and become a second, hidden mana source, so the spell rewards the same self-mill, fetchlands, and cheap cantrips that aggressive midrange decks already run for other reasons. The tension is that every card delved is a card not flashed back, not reanimated, not re-cast, which is the discipline that keeps the rate from being free. Where most delve cards of this generation buy a spell effect (the cantrip on Treasure Cruise, the card filtering elsewhere), this one buys a clock: trample on a four-power body means the discount is paid forward into combat damage rather than card advantage. It is the green entry in that wave of delve designs, and the most aggressive in intent, a beater that asks you to empty your graveyard rather than mine it for value.