Portent of Betrayal

The Threaten effect has always been priced for the kitchen table: borrow a creature, swing once, and ideally feed it to a sacrifice outlet before it goes home. This version pays four mana for that loan, which is steep next to the two-mana takes on the same trick, and the scry 1 bolted on is the tell that the steal was never the strong part. What the extra mana buys is a little smoothing on a card that otherwise builds nothing on your own side of the board: you grab the blocker or the finisher, untap it, hand it haste, and then scry to point your next draw somewhere useful. That filtering matters precisely because a temporary-control sorcery is about as variance-prone as red spells get. The spell still needs a legal target to resolve, so it is genuinely dead against an empty board and cannot be fired off blank just to dig; but when there is a creature worth taking, the scry keeps the turn from feeling entirely spent. Note that the scry only looks and reorders: it filters, it does not draw, so the steal is still a net card down. Measured against the leaner Threaten descendants, this one accepts a worse rate in exchange for that peek, a steal-and-swing built less for raw tempo than for shaving a small edge each time it connects.