Nantuko Shrine

A symmetric engine built entirely on a quiet observation about graveyards: cards stack up there by name, and a graveyard-heavy era all but guaranteed that they would. Every spell anyone casts checks how many copies of itself already sit in graveyards, then mints that many Squirrels for the caster. In a singleton vacuum it does almost nothing, which is the joke and the trap. Build around it and the math turns vicious: a deck running four copies of a cheap spell can cast its third and fourth from hand while two are already dead, watching the count climb as the graveyard fills. The trick is one of direction. Flashback works against the engine rather than for it, since casting from the graveyard removes the copy from the count and exiles it on resolution; the payoff lives in conventional copies that go to the yard and stay there, feeding later casts of the same name. The symmetry is real but lopsided in practice, since the player who knows the trigger is there is the only one sequencing spells to feed it. The design asks you to value a card's name as a resource the way later enchantments would value its mana value or its type, paying off graveyard count rather than graveyard contents. The mechanic underneath is colder than the Squirrels suggest: a reward for redundancy, for casting the same thing again, for a graveyard full of duplicates most decks treat as overdraw.