Startled Awake // Persistent Nightmare

Most mill spells are a single transaction: pay the cost, take the cards off the top, watch the spell go to the graveyard for good. The front face does exactly that, thirteen at a fixed price. The design question is what happens once the sorcery lands in the graveyard, and the answer reframes the whole thing as a reusable threat rather than a spent shot. Five mana at sorcery speed flips it into a creature, and that creature is built to survive: skulk slips it past anything with greater power, and the combat-damage trigger returns it to hand the moment it connects. That bounce is the loop's hinge. It does not mill on its own; it just hands the sorcery back to you, so the next turn you recast Startled Awake and remove another thirteen. Connect, bounce, recast, repeat. The recursion answers the structural problem with every mill plan: one front-loaded spell mills once and then asks the deck to find more, while this asks only that the creature get through and that you keep the five mana to bring it back after a wrath. The cost of that durability is tempo. Each cycle spans a combat step plus the recast, the small body leans entirely on skulk to keep swinging, and the mana keeps adding up. It trades the burst of a one-shot mill spell for a slow, repeatable installment plan against the library.