West Coast Expansion
X-scaled draw is one of blue's most durable shapes, and the base rate here follows the lineage of Blue Sun's Zenith and Stroke of Genius: pay the tax, sink mana into X, and let the size of the refill be capped by how much you were willing to invest. What sets this apart is the payoff bolted onto the top end. Cross five cards drawn and the spell stops being pure card advantage: it becomes a ritual that funds a free Hero spell from the same hand it just replenished. The tension is deliberate. A modest X leaves you with a clean cantrip-plus, while the free-cast clause only unlocks once you have committed enough mana that the draw alone would already swing the turn. That five-card gate does the balancing work; it prices the tempo swing (drawing a fistful of cards, then deploying a Hero without paying for it) into the same act of casting, so the payoff can never come cheap. Restricting the free cast to Hero-typed spells ties the reward to a specific card pool rather than letting it cheat out anything in hand. It is a top-heavy design that rewards flooding out: the more the deck is built to reach the threshold, the more the second clause converts a big draw into a big tempo swing on the same turn.
