Power of Persuasion

Bounce is the safest tempo play in blue and the least satisfying: a good bounce spell tells you exactly what you're buying before you cast it. This one refuses to. The d20 splits the effect into three tiers of escalating severity, and every band is at least as good as the one below it, which turns casting the spell into a wager rather than a decision. That is what the dice mechanic buys as a design tool: it lets a common-tier tempo spell reach an outcome (temporary control of an opponent's creature) that would price it as a rare if it were guaranteed. The 20 imports Threaten-style larceny into a spell that mostly resets the board, and it does so without warping the cost, because you land there only 5% of the time. The floor, a straight hand-return, is the ordinary bounce you already understood, and it is the rarer result: at 45% it comes up less than half the time. The likeliest single band, at 50%, is the middle one, where the creature's owner chooses top or bottom of their library. That is strictly stronger for the caster than the floor, since it either eats a draw step or buries the creature deep. So the odds themselves are stacked upward: more than half your rolls beat a clean bounce. What reads as a novelty plays as one, a spell for tables that want the twenty-sided die to matter more than the mana curve.