In Search of Greatness
The engine is a curve, not a threat. Where most free-cast enablers hunt for a single splashy payoff, this one wants a ladder: play a two-drop, and next upkeep you can drop a three-drop for nothing; land the four, and the five comes free the turn after. The escalation is self-fueling, because each permanent you sneak out raises the ceiling for the next one, and the whole thing runs on your permanent count rather than your mana. That "1 plus the greatest mana value among other permanents" clause is the discipline holding it in check: you cannot skip rungs, and a hand full of high-end bombs stalls it dead until the board catches up. The scry-1 consolation is quietly load-bearing, since the turns you whiff still filter your draws toward the next rung. What it rewards is a deck with no gaps in its curve and no reliance on instants, which is a genuinely different deckbuilding constraint from the sacrifice fodder and creature-reanimation shells that usually surround free-cast effects. The value here is measured in tempo saved rather than cards drawn, and it punishes the greedy pile that skips a mana value as surely as it rewards the tightly stacked one.
