Seething Anger

A pump spell built around the buyback experiment that defined its era of design. The base effect is a throwaway: a one-mana sorcery that boosts power without touching toughness, a common-slot filler nobody remembers. Buyback is the entire pitch. For three extra mana, the spell refuses to leave your hand, turning a single use into a repeatable mana sink that converts a flooded board state into incremental damage. That is the structural tension buyback was designed to explore: a card that is cheap when you need a quick boost and expensive when you need to grind, with the player choosing which mode the spell occupies on each cast. Seething Anger is one of the plainer expressions of that idea, a vanilla pump with the buyback rider bolted on, but it shows the mechanic's appeal in miniature. Because it is a sorcery, the recursion lives on your own main phase rather than at the point of combat: each turn you spend four mana to send a creature in three points larger and keep the spell for next time, threatening the same swing again until the defender either trades or stabilizes. The cost structure is the restraint that balances the rate. Paying four mana total for +3/+0 is a poor return on its own, so the card only earns its keep once the game has run long enough that you have nothing better to spend mana on.