Intrude on the Mind

The Fact or Fiction chassis with a hostage rider attached. Where the original just splits five cards and lets an opponent decide which pile you keep, this version turns the cards you lose into a scaling reward: every card the opponent buries feeds a flying Thopter. That inverts the usual tension of pile-splitting. In a straight Fact or Fiction, the caster wants both piles to be roughly even so the opponent's choice can't hurt too much; here, a lopsided one-and-four split isn't a punishment, because a four-card graveyard pile hands you a 4/4 flier while the opponent grants you the single card you most wanted. The opponent is stuck adjudicating between card advantage and board presence for you, and neither answer is clean. What the design really smooths over is the dead-draw floor of the effect: if the piles are junk, you're at least walking away with a body instead of a hand of chaff. That's the quiet upgrade on the archetype. Fact or Fiction and its descendants always risked leaving you with nothing worth keeping and no reason to have cast it; folding the graveyard cards into a token means the spell can never fully whiff, since the pile you'd have hated is now the pile that builds your creature.