Careful Study

Filling the bin is the actual job here, and the card draw is the cover story. The spell costs you a card to cast, so drawing two and discarding two nets you down one: this is card disadvantage, not filtering, and a deck that just wants to dig deeper owns better tools. What it offers that pure selection does not is the ability to choose what goes to the yard, and to do it for a single blue mana on turn one. That makes it the cleanest enabler for any strategy that mines its own graveyard: reanimation lines that want a fatty in the bin before turn two, flashback and delve payoffs, threshold counts, or any card that reads "from your graveyard." The discard is not a cost being mitigated; it is the entire effect, with the draw working to find the thing you most want to throw away. That inversion (a spell whose downside is its point) is what keeps it relevant long after stronger raw card-advantage spells have eclipsed it. It does demand the supporting cast: cast on an empty hand it simply swaps two unknowns for two unknowns, surrendering tempo and a card in the bargain. But for a deck assembled to abuse a stocked graveyard, dumping two specific cards on turn one for one mana is a rate that has held its place across every era of graveyard-centric blue.