Leaves from the Vine

The design here is a self-feeding graveyard engine dressed as a three-turn value curve. Chapter I fills your own bin by three, chapter II grows a pair of bodies, and chapter III cashes out for a card, but only if the graveyard it seeded in chapter I is holding a creature or Lesson. That conditional draw is the interesting knot: the Saga is built to make its own final trigger reliable, milling into the yard precisely so the last chapter has something to check for. It rarely fizzles because it stocked the shelf itself two turns earlier. The self-mill is the mechanic doing double duty, which is where the Food token earns its place: a two-mana enchantment that hits your own library while offering nothing to the board is exactly the kind of thing an aggressive draw punishes, and three life on demand hedges that gap without slowing the engine down. So each chapter feeds a different axis (graveyard, board, hand) with the Food as a life buffer riding alongside, and none of the counters you spend three turns accruing are wasted motion. A Saga that mills you resolves its own small design tension by making the mill the setup for its payoff: the counters all point toward a graveyard you built on purpose, and the third chapter is you collecting on a debt you arranged to owe yourself.