Proctor's Gaze

Bounce spells have always fought a losing battle with tempo math: you spend a card and mana to undo a permanent, the opponent spends nothing to recast it, and you are down a card for the trouble. This one pays your own way back. Every cast advances your mana development, and when you do bounce something it sets the opponent back a beat, so the exchange that usually costs you a card instead trades even and leaves you a land ahead. That reframes what the bounce is for. Against an early threat it buys a turn while accelerating you past it; against a resolved engine or an equipped attacker it is a reset that also builds your board. The basic-land clause is the ceiling that keeps the card from being pure card advantage: the land arrives tapped and it has to be a basic, so this ramps toward color-hungry payoffs rather than into a fetch-and-shock manabase. Instant speed is where it earns its keep, letting you hold up the effect as interaction and cash it in for ramp only when nothing threatens, or bounce a blocker mid-combat and untap into a swollen mana pool. It is the rare answer that never leaves you flooded on dead removal, because when there is nothing worth bouncing, the fixing half still does honest work.