Aladdin's Lamp

A ten-mana artifact that filters but does not draw, from a set where the design language was still being invented. The lamp is a card-selection engine bolted onto the draw step: you pay X to dig X deep, scrap the rest into a randomized bottom, and the draw you were already going to take becomes a chosen card instead of a top-decked one. The framing is the tell. In 1993 the vocabulary for tutoring did not exist yet, so the effect is built as a replacement for the natural draw rather than as a search; the random-bottom clause exists because shuffling-as-a-cost had not been standardized either. The cost structure is the other artifact of the era: ten to cast, then X more to activate, and a starting point of just to look one deep at the worst exchange rate the game would ever offer. What it represents is a designer reaching for the idea of a tutor without any of the templating that would later make tutors concise: Demonic Tutor was already in Alpha doing the same job for two mana, but the lamp is trying to be repeatable, and repeatability in 1993 meant paying for it twice and accepting that the back half of your library was now in random order. A curiosity, and a useful one for tracking how the game's design grammar matured.