Pestilent Cauldron // Restorative Burst

Two faces pinned to opposite clocks, and the double-faced frame makes them mutually exclusive: cast the Cauldron and the Burst is gone; cast the Burst and you never had the artifact. That single-slot commitment is the whole tension, because the modes serve entirely different ends of a game. The front is a grinding value engine built on a self-referential loop: discard a card to make a Pest, let the Pest die for one life, and that life becomes the mill counter, each currency feeding the next until an opponent's library is the target. The back is a single restorative discharge for when your graveyard is already deep: up to two creature, land, or planeswalker cards raked back to hand, everyone padded four life, then it exiles itself so the reset cannot be re-run. Modality here functions as a pacing choice rather than a scaling trick. The two options wait in hand until you commit, but they are not a small tweak on the same effect: one is a bet on the long grind, the other a bet on the late reversal, and one draw must resolve the wager. The front fills graveyards on both sides of the table as fuel for its exile-four-for-a-draw mode; the back plunders your own yard for permanents. Nothing here is fast, which is exactly the assumption it makes about how long the game will last.