Pulsar Squadron Ace

A Pilot that digs for its own payoff, then consoles itself when the dig comes up empty. The design problem here is familiar to anyone who has built a mechanic-matters common: a card that only functions when it finds a Spacecraft is dead weight in the games where it whiffs, so the version you want to run and the version you can survive drawing pull apart. The self-correcting failure clause resolves that tension cleanly. Reveal a Spacecraft off the top five and you bank it; find nothing and the 1/2 grows into a 2/3, a body still worth swinging with. Neither outcome is a blank. The look-five-take-one shape does quieter work than raw card advantage: it is card selection filtered toward a single card type rather than draw, so a deck concentrated on Spacecraft gets rewarded without the card ever demanding that concentration, and the random-bottom clause means it never smooths your subsequent draws. What lifts it above a filtering trigger is the counter as consolation, a symmetry that guarantees relevance in both directions and reduces the deckbuilding question to a single number: how many Spacecraft justify running it at all.