Open the Way

The scaling clause is the whole design conceit, but not in the way the mana line suggests. X caps at the number of players in the game, and you still pay for whatever value you choose. What the table gives you is not cheaper ramp, it is a higher ceiling: in a duel you can never point this at more than two lands, but in a full pod the same card can be cast for a much larger X to drag four onto the battlefield at once. The size of the table sets how big this is allowed to get, and then you pay for the version you want. Rather than digging to a fixed depth like most green ramp, it reveals until it hits the target count of lands, so a top-heavy library can churn through a big chunk of your deck to find them, and the nonland cards you flip go to the bottom in random order, quietly reshuffling what you would have drawn next. The lands arrive tapped, which fences it off from mana-burst combo turns and keeps it a sorcery-speed acceleration piece. The reveal is public, too: the whole pod watches your deck's top declaw itself, learning what you are not about to draw. A spell that treats the number of players as a permission slip rather than a threat is a specifically multiplayer instinct, and this is built entirely around it.