­Beacon of Creation tells me this probably costs far too much. Seems this is a tricky card to cost. At , this card would appear to have one advantage over Beacon... that you can get a single insect when you have three lands (well, and not all your lands need to be Forests. I suppose that's important.) But for that small tweak of utility, you suffer a two insect loss for every other amount of lands you have in play. That's probably fine at uncommon.

I've been assuming there was a power reason that it got shuffled back into the deck, but I'm not familiar with Standard at the time. This is supposed to be a cycle with (((Fertility Lifegain))), (((Fertile Ideas))) and Fertility Rot. I'm not sure whether to do an Increasing Savagery-style effect here when I already got Fertility Bond....

I'm pretty sure that the Beacon cycle shuffled back to give you a chance to draw and play it again, just like its recent throwback, the Zenith cycle.

So it wasn't an anti-revival thing the way it was on (e.g.) Darksteel Colossus?

Five mana grizzly bear; six mana for a 4/4; 7 mana for 6/6, breaks even at 8 mana for an 8/8 and above that live the dream... Yeah, that works I guess.

Actually I'm thinking (((Fertility Bindings))) may be the best basis: one and one extra for each untapped (so the spell isn't useless if there are not untapped lands). Any thoughts?

@Darksteel Colossus: You know, that's perceptive of you to have thought the shuffling to the library might be an anti-recursion clause. All the Beacons are powerful cards, after all... I could definitely see them do that with Time Warp just to make sure that card doesn't get played turn after turn.

But, in a vacuum, shuffling a powerful effect back into the deck is a benefit, not a drawback. Sure, they use it sometimes as a way to stop you from Zombifying a particularly nasty creature... but I've yet to see them print it on a sorcery for power level reasons. Maybe they would if there were a sizeable number of cards that let you cast sorceries in your graveyard for free... but there aren't many cards let you 'Zombify' a spell straight up... Hmm...

You're right, jm. Grafdigger's Cage and its ilk make much better global security valves anyway.

Most instants and sorceries that require recursion hosing exile themselves on resolution, like Time Reversal or Spelltwine.