Rousing Refrain
Ritual mana with a hidden dependency: the payoff scales off your opponent's hand size, not your own board or graveyard, which inverts the usual "the fuller my hand, the more I ramp" logic entirely. The more cards an opponent is hoarding, the more red mana this pours out, so it quietly rewards aiming the spell at the durdling control player rather than the empty-handed aggressor. What makes the ramp usable rather than a fizzling burst is the second clause: the mana survives the emptying of your mana pool between steps and phases, so a big activation carries across your whole turn instead of evaporating at the end of your main phase. That is the design decision doing the real work, because floating five or six red past a phase transition is what turns this from a one-shot into a genuine sequencing tool. And it does not stay spent: rather than dropping into the graveyard, the sorcery exiles itself with three time counters and cycles back through suspend, so the same ritual returns three upkeeps later to fuel a second explosive turn. The suspend cost on the front end offers the same recursion in reverse, letting you set it up cheaply and cash it in when a board state makes an opponent's grip swell. It is a ramp spell built to be reused and pointed outward, an unusual axis for red mana acceleration.




