Snooping Newsie

The condition here is not depth but variety: not how many cards sit in the graveyard, but how many distinct mana values do. Most graveyard payoffs count raw cards or a single card type, so the deckbuilding math rewards redundancy: run four copies of the same enabler and the threshold ticks up. Here it inverts. Dumping five copies of a one-drop does nothing toward the count, while a spread of costs from one to five flips the switch, so the card asks for a textured yard rather than a deep one. The enter-the-battlefield mill of two is a single down payment, not an engine; it seeds the count once and then leans on the rest of the deck (a spellslinger or self-mill shell filling the graveyard from every angle) to reach five distinct values. Until then this is a bare 2/2. Once the threshold is met the payoff is modest but efficient: the extra point of body is the smaller half, since the lifelink is what changes the creature's role, turning an aggressive two-drop into a body that can attack into a board without trading down on life. The design's cleverness is in the constraint it picks, mana-value diversity, which rewards a color pair already inclined to trade cards for resources and to treat the graveyard as a second hand, without paying you for stuffing it full of the same thing.