Neverending Torment

Epic is the most punishing keyword the game has shipped: cast one spell and you have surrendered the rest of your spells for the entire game, with a free copy arriving on every future upkeep as compensation. That trade only makes sense if the copies are doing something inevitable, and exiling cards from a library is the rare effect that compounds toward an actual loss condition rather than just generating value. The exile is mechanically distinct from graveyard mill: cards leave the game entirely, so no recursion or flashback survives the cut. The wrinkle is the scaling. X is your hand size at resolution, and the copies on later upkeeps recount it each time, so the engine rewards an empty board and a full grip simultaneously. There is the design tension baked into the card: the epic ability forbids you from casting anything, so your hand can only grow through draw steps and battlefield effects, never through new spells. A locked-out caster sitting on a fat hand is exactly the line this wants, and it is a strange, almost contradictory thing to ask of a deck. The copies also let you pick a new target each turn, so a multiplayer table can be dismantled library by library while the caster does nothing but untap and let the trigger fire. It is a finisher that asks you to stop playing the game in order to win it.