Welcome to the Fold

Two spells wearing one name, sorted by how the card reaches the stack. Cast it straight and the toughness cap is pinned at 2 or less: a permanent theft that only grips the smallest bodies, the sort you rarely bother stealing. Route it through the discard clause and the cap becomes X, so the same open-ended control-grab climbs high enough to swipe almost anything on the board. Both modes keep the creature for good; the only variable is how far the ceiling rises. What makes this a payoff rather than a control spell is that discarding it stops being a penalty and turns into the ignition: the mechanic rewards you for pitching it, and the toughness cap only widens once you do. That leaves it alive only inside a shell that generates its own discards (a looting effect, a hand-size trigger, some outlet that ditches a card as part of another plan) and dead in hand if it gets drawn onto an empty board with nothing to throw it away with. Permanent theft with a scaling toughness ceiling is a genuinely strong rate; what tempers it is that the shell has to exist first, because the spell contributes nothing toward building the discard engine it depends on.