Vault 112: Sadistic Simulation

The Saga structure hides a two-color tempo engine that pays itself off on the back end. Chapters I and II do the same thing twice: soft-lock a creature with a tap-and-stun, forcing it to skip an untap, while banking two energy each time. That patient front half exists to fuel the third chapter, where the card stops being control and becomes a payoff. The final act lets you spend energy, shuffle, and impulse-dig that many cards off the top, playing one for free. What makes the scaling matter is that energy is a shared, persistent resource: the Saga generates four on its own across two chapters, but nothing stops other energy sources from feeding a much larger payoff on III, and because the reservoir persists, that cuts both ways. Chapter III asks for "any amount," so the sequencing decision it forces is not spend-or-waste but calibration: dump the whole stockpile for the biggest dig, or hold some back to power an energy sink elsewhere on a later turn. The disruption chapters are not idle time; they are deliberate tempo taxation on the way to the reward, each stun buying a turn while the counter accrues. The sacrifice clause fires the moment you resolve III, so you are pricing the dig against everything else your energy base wants to do, at exactly the point the Saga leaves play. It turns a slow three-turn clock into a single measured burst, sized to whatever reservoir you have chosen to build.