Johann's Stopgap

A bounce spell whose price is a negotiation with your own board. The base rate is deliberately soft: four mana to return a nonland permanent and draw a card is fine value, but no deck is built around a four-mana Repulse. Everything tips on the discount. Sacrifice a spent token, a used-up artifact, an enchantment that has already earned its keep, and the same effect drops to two mana, a tempo-positive play in a shell already spilling out disposable permanents. Bargain rewards decks generating fodder they were happy to lose anyway, and taxes decks that just want a cheap tempo swing with nothing to feed it. The bounce-and-cantrip effect itself is old news, functionally a cantripping cousin of the ancient blue bounce line. What earns it a second look is the sliding cost and the decision it forces every time you cast it: is that permanent worth more sitting on the battlefield, or worth more as the two-mana toll on a bounce? Return your own creature to reuse a summoning trigger, clear a blocker to push damage, reset an opponent's committed permanent. The flexibility is standard. The tension between wanting the spell cheap and wanting to keep your stuff is the design idea, and it is the only reason a four-mana bounce warrants any attention at all.