Pegasus Stampede
A buyback card whose recursion cost is paid in land, which is the rare wrinkle worth pausing on. Buyback normally asks for extra mana, taxing your tempo turn over turn while leaving your resource base intact. Here the tax is structural: every replay shrinks your manabase by one, so the engine is self-limiting in a way mana-cost buyback is not. You can return it to hand each cast, but each return prunes the very mana that lets you keep casting it, and a 1/1 flier is a slow clock to be paying lands for. The design reads as a deliberate counterweight to the open-ended token loops buyback could otherwise enable: a recursive spell that converts permanents into bodies eventually runs out of permanents to convert. As a one-shot it is plain (two mana for a single evasive token), and the buyback line only makes sense once your draws have dried up and surplus lands are worth more as fliers than as mana. What lands here is a card that scales inversely with how much you want it: the more you lean on the buyback, the weaker your position becomes, which is an honest piece of design even if it never made the engine worth assembling.



