Blood Price

Card advantage in black has always come with a bill attached, and the arithmetic here is unusually gentle: four mana buys two of your top four with the life loss capped at a flat two, regardless of what you take. That fixed cost is the point. Where older black draw effects scale their pain with the payload, this one refuses to punish you for a good hit. The dig does the real work. Seeing four and keeping two is a filtering rate closer to selection than raw draw, letting you skip the flood or the dead removal spell rather than being forced to keep it. The two you reject go to the bottom of the library in an order you choose, so a card you do not want now is not gone, just deferred behind everything else you draw first. The net card economy is the same +1 that a plain two-card draw would give you; what changes is the control. You look at twice as many cards as you keep, and you decide which pair leaves your hand's reach and which pair enters it. Set against Read the Bones, which draws two and scries two, the trade is legible: Read the Bones sees more of your library but commits to whatever the top two turn out to be, while this trims the top four down to the best half and buries the rest on your own terms.