Unstable Experiment

Cantrips have always paid for themselves by asking nothing of the board; this one folds the draw into a battlefield-facing choice at instant speed. The first clause reads clean: someone draws, and "target player" leaves the door open to gifting the draw when a symmetrical political trade or a Nekusar-style punisher wants it, though the caster is the obvious default. What sharpens the second half beyond a plain draw is that connive routes fresh looting through a creature. The discard is not dead-weight cleanup: pitch a nonland and a +1/+1 counter lands on the creature, which turns card selection into a combat trick. Both targets are locked at cast, so the play is planned before you cast rather than sorted out on resolution: flash it in during declare-blockers to grow a chosen attacker past its blocker, then walk away with a net-neutral hand, or cast it as pure velocity and dump an excess land with no growth attached. The "up to one" clause is the release valve, but not a filtering one: with no creature targeted, the connive simply does not happen, and the spell collapses to a bare two-mana draw. That is the honest floor here, and it is worth knowing before you build around the pump. The reason to run a card that on paper only draws you even is the top of the range: draw, then grow a creature you committed to when the spell went on the stack. It is connive doing what the mechanic was built for: binding card flow to board development so the second half matters as much as the first.