Agent of Acquisitions

The first design that turned the draft itself into the resource you spend. A Construct body and a cheap mana cost are almost beside the point: this is a card whose text governs the act of drafting it, an artifact that asks you to mortgage an entire round of picks in exchange for emptying one booster pack into your pool wholesale. The trade is brutal and clean. Take everything from a single pack, then sit out the rest of the round, picking nothing while the table drains its remaining packs. It is a card about timing and commitment more than about anything that happens once the game begins, the kind of effect that only makes sense in a format where the draft is a shared object you can manipulate. The body it leaves behind, once you flip it face down and spend your round, is incidental; you cast Agent of Acquisitions for the dozen-plus cards it siphons, not for the 2/1 that follows them home. As a piece of mechanical engineering it pointed toward an entire category of cards that reach out of the game and into the structures around it, treating booster contents, table position, and pick order as legal targets. Almost nothing before it had asked you to make a strategic decision about the draft as a system rather than about the cards inside it.