Research the Deep

Clash was the keyword built to reward decks with a top-heavy curve, and this is what the mechanic was reaching for in its purest form: a cantrip that draws unconditionally, then gambles on the recursion for free. The card draw happens regardless, so even a losing clash has bought you a card and a peek at both players' top cards for two mana. Take the clash, and the spell comes back to your hand at no additional cost, turning a one-shot cantrip into a repeatable one across the game. The tension lives entirely in deck construction: the more high-mana-value cards you run, the more often the clash breaks your way, so the recursion is a tax on building your deck around it rather than a tax on casting it. That makes it an unusual sort of card-advantage engine, one whose efficiency you fix before the game starts and cannot adjust once it begins. The clash mechanic never found a permanent home in the game's design, which leaves this as a curiosity from a brief experiment in library manipulation that rewarded curve-stacking: a cantrip whose ceiling is decided by how greedy you were willing to be when you registered the deck.