Sparring Dummy

Green almost never gets a repeatable self-mill outlet, and the tension is obvious: dumping lands into the graveyard is a liability for a color that wants them in hand, not buried. The land clause defuses that risk after the fact. Every tap mills a card for real (it goes to the graveyard first, exactly as the reminder text spells out), but if that card was a land, you may pull it back into hand rather than leave it in the yard. That salvage step is what reclassifies the whole ability from raw disruption into slow, one-card-at-a-time selection. Because the effect only advances a single card per activation, it never digs the deep hole a larger mill number would threaten; the smoothing keeps pace with the exposure. The Lesson rider bolts a second incentive onto the same tap without asking the deck to warp around it, handing you incidental life whenever the milled card happens to be a Lesson. All of this rides on a body that costs the deck nothing to field: a 1/3 with Defender that holds the ground floor while the tap ability grinds behind it, never fighting for the combat step. The result is a Scarecrow tuned to sift its owner's own library toward hand and life total, a rare case of green mill pointed inward at card flow rather than outward at the graveyard as a resource.