Teachings of the Archaics

A catch-up draw spell with the honesty baked into its condition: it does nothing when you are ahead on cards, and its ceiling only opens when you are badly behind. That deficit-scaling gives it a different logic from a flat-rate draw like Divination, which hands you two cards regardless of the board state. Here you pay for a spell that reads the hand-size gap and refunds accordingly: two cards when an opponent has merely out-drawn you, three when the disparity has become a rout. The design reasons like a comeback mechanic rather than an engine. The player ground out in an attrition war, or the one staring down a durable card-advantage engine, gets the biggest payout, precisely the player for whom flat card draw arrives too late to matter. The Lesson type completes the equation, letting the spell live outside the main deck and be fetched only in the games where the hand-size math actually favors it, so the conditional never has to sit dead in an opening hand you are winning from. It is a measured answer to a real design tension: pure card draw tends to reward the player already winning the attrition war, and this one deliberately refuses to, paying out only to the side that has fallen behind.