Reap Intellect

Discard effects usually fight the present: knock a card out of hand, watch the opponent draw a replacement next turn. This one fights the deck. The X-controlled hand-pick is only the first step; the payoff is the name-matching sweep that follows, exiling every copy of each chosen card across hand, graveyard, and library at once. Against a playset, taking one card means taking the rest of the set still buried in the deck, plus any that have already hit the graveyard. The design logic is surgical rather than disruptive: you are not slowing the opponent down, you are deleting a named card from their library entirely. That makes it a poor cast against a hand of singletons and a devastating one against any deck leaning on redundant copies of a key piece. The double-pip cost and the scaling carry the tension every X-spell does, except the floor here is steep: even X=1 means committing five mana to erase a single name, so the spell rarely justifies itself until you can take several at once. What pays for the reach is that none of the exiling touches the battlefield: it does nothing to the board, and the X cards you take are chosen before you know how the game develops, so you spend a turn reshaping a future you can only partially see. It is the rare attrition spell measured not in cards taken but in cards that never get to exist.