Skull of Orm

An artifact built for a deck archetype the game had barely sketched out in 1994: enchantment recursion. The body of the design is a loop with a steep tax built in. Five mana plus the tap to buy back a single enchantment from the graveyard is a punishing rate for one card returned, and that friction is the whole point. The card assumes you are reusing something worth far more than the activation: a board-warping enchantment, or a sacrificial one you intend to play, destroy, and replay. The repeatability is what separated it from a one-shot regrowth effect, since the Skull stays on the battlefield and can fire every turn you can pay for it. The trouble is that enchantments cheap enough to loop profitably and impactful enough to want back rarely overlapped this early, leaving the engine theoretically sound but practically starved for fuel. It reads now as a piece of forward design: an enchantment-matters payoff printed before the cards that would make enchantment-matters a real strategy existed. The slow accumulation of enchantment-centric sets in the decades since gave the effect a context it never had at printing, but the original tax remains the same deliberate brake, asking you to commit a full turn's worth of mana to a single recursion rather than churning a graveyard for free.