Training Grounds
A cost reducer aimed at the one place reducers usually aren't allowed: the activated ability. Spell-cost discounts have always been plentiful, but the ability cost is where the truly degenerate engines live, and the floor clause is what lets this enchantment exist without breaking. By refusing to push any activation below one mana, it leaves a creature with a zero-mana or one-mana activation untouched, but it cuts a four-mana untap-and-do-something engine in half and makes a three-mana ability nearly free. That single restriction separates incremental advantage from a hard combo, and the card lives right on the edge of it: pair it with anything whose activation includes two or three generic mana and the math swings from grinding to looping. The cleanest expression is a creature that untaps itself for mana or copies something; halve that activation and you have a repeatable loop the card was clearly built to flirt with. What makes it more than a curiosity is how openly it invites the player to find the abuse rather than punishing miscalculation: it reads as a value piece and behaves as a combo enabler the moment a single untap or tutor ability enters the picture. A one-mana enchantment that does nothing on cast and everything on the next creature you tap is a deliberate piece of engine-building bait, and the floor clause is the only adult in the room.

Rules text
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Other printings
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