Monstrify

Retrace turns a one-shot pump spell into a recurring threat that drains a different resource than the one most combat cards tax. The +4/+4 itself is generous but unremarkable; the design idea lives in how you pay for the encore. Because this is a sorcery, every cast happens on your own main phase, which keeps it honest in a way an instant-speed pump would not: there is no surprise, no ambush, just a creature you decide to grow before you swing. Each subsequent cast comes off the top of your graveyard at the price of a land you discard, so the spell's real late-game cost is your excess mana rather than fresh cards drawn. That reframes it as a mana sink wearing the costume of a growth spell: a deck flooding on lands can keep relaunching the same creature into bigger and bigger attacks, converting dead draws into damage. The constraint is the land requirement itself. Retrace asks you to part with a card type you would otherwise want to keep developing, so the loop only stays live while you have lands to burn, and each relaunch is a small admission that your manabase has stopped mattering. It rewards a board where one evasive or trampling body is enough to close, and the rest is repetition. That is the quiet logic of retrace: not card advantage so much as a conversion rate, letting a glut of lands cash out as repeated swings rather than rot in hand.