Restless Dreams

Regrowth dressed up as a numbers game, and the math is the whole catch. Each creature you pull from the yard costs a card discarded from hand, so the X you scale toward is always paid in raw card disadvantage: a sorcery that returns three creatures sounds like a windfall until you remember the additional cost ate three to do it, and the spell itself ate a fourth. Discard X to return X is a net loss of one card before you spend the mana to recast anything. The discard is the entire reason this is one black mana instead of a Standard-warping engine, but it was born into an era built around treating discard as a benefit rather than a tax, and that recontextualizes the whole transaction. The cards you pitch can be madness spells cast for their alternative cost, creatures you would rather have in the bin than the hand, or fuel for threshold and other graveyard payoffs. Read against that backdrop, it stops being clumsy mass-regrowth and becomes a dual-purpose enabler, loading the yard and reloading the hand with creatures in a single motion. It only makes sense when you treat the discard as the point and not the price: as a straight recursion spell it is a losing trade, and the moment you stop reading the X as power and start reading it as how many cards you wanted to throw away, the design clicks.