Summons of Saruman

The X here is doing three jobs from a single variable, and that overload is the whole design. It sets the size of your Orc Army, the depth of the mill, and the ceiling on the free spell you can steal off the top of your own library. That triple-binding is what makes the card tricky to price: you want X high enough that the amass matters and the mill digs deep, but the free cast only pays off if a castable instant or sorcery of mana value X or less happens to land in the pile you just milled. There is no selection, no rummaging: you name a number, flip that many cards face-up, and hope. Build around it and the gamble tightens, since a deck stuffed with cheap spells turns the mill from graveyard fodder into a live tutor that also grew a body. The flashback is the quiet honesty in the package. It costs a fixed and asks you to exile X cards from your graveyard, so the encore fights the very fuel that self-mill wants to accumulate. You pay for the second cast in the graveyard currency you spent the game hoarding, which keeps a spell that spawns an Army, digs as deep as your mana allows, and casts something for free from also being repeatable at no cost.