Red Room Recruit

Connive-on-a-body is one of the cleaner ways to bolt card selection onto a small creature: it filters the moment it lands, and grows itself only if the loot leaves you with something worth binning. The elegance is in the order of operations. Connive draws first, then discards, so the counter is never a reward for already holding a spell-heavy hand; it is contingent on what you pitch after you have seen the new card. Draw into a land you do not need and you can bin it to smooth your next few turns, or discard a nonland and take the growth. Either way the trigger self-corrects when you are flooding, since pitching a land keeps the 1/2 static and simply improves what you draw next. Discard a nonland and you upgrade to a 2/3 while trading your worst card for the one you just drew. That is the distinction that matters: connive is a loot, not a cantrip. It never nets you a card; it improves the one you draw into and asks you to sort your hand at the moment of impact. Because it fires on entry rather than on attack, it does its filtering whether or not the body survives to swing, which makes it hand-quality glue for a deck that wants graveyard fuel and instant-speed density more than it wants a beater. Not a card that carries a hand, but one that leaves every hand it joins a little more functional.