Inspired Idea

Three cards for three mana has historically come with a leash, and here the leash is a permanent hand-size clamp: the base cost undersells raw card advantage precisely because you agree to a tax that punishes you every turn you sit above four cards. What turns this into a genuine curve decision rather than a fixed spell is cleave, the mechanic doing all the interesting work. Rather than paying around the drawback, the cleave cost literally deletes the bracketed clause, so the two extra mana do not buy more cards; they buy a clean draw-three with no strings, a naked Concentrate. That gap is the entire design. Early, when you are dumping your hand onto an empty board anyway, the reduced maximum barely registers and the discounted line is a bargain; late, when you want to hold up interaction and bank resources across turns, the clamp becomes a real leak and the premium earns itself. The card reframes the old drawback-for-efficiency template (pay less, accept a downside) into a payment you can opt out of entirely, which converts a static rate into a question you answer differently depending on the turn you cast it. Cleave is the lever, and this spell shows cleanly what the mechanic was built to do: not modality between two effects, but the same effect with its cost attached to the presence or absence of its own fine print.