Teapot Slinger

Expend is a threshold, not an accumulator: the trigger fires exactly once per turn, the instant your spending crosses the fourth-mana line, and then it is spent until the next turn. That single-shot shape is the whole discipline of the mechanic, and it changes what this raccoon is actually rewarding. It does not care how you get there. One four-drop trips it just as cleanly as a chain of cantrips; the card only asks that you reach four total mana at all, and most functional turns do. What it pays for is consistency, not granularity: a deck that reliably deploys four-plus mana of spells every turn taxes each opponent for two, over and over, as a passive tick on top of whatever those spells were already doing. Menace is the second axis. The 3/4 body is a real clock that a single blocker cannot answer, so pressure comes from two directions at once: the expend ping that ignores the board entirely, and a creature that demands two bodies to stop. Neither is large in isolation. Together they turn ordinary spellcasting into incidental reach against every opponent at the table, punishing the durdle without asking you to assemble anything. The ceiling is not how finely you can slice your mana; it is how many turns you keep casting.