Cephalid Looter

The repeatable filtering engine that taught a generation of players to put cards in the graveyard on purpose. Tap, draw, discard: that loop reads like marginal smoothing until you stop counting the cards reaching hand and start counting the ones hitting the bin. When the graveyard became a second resource to be mined, a free self-discard outlet that ticked once a turn was the cleanest way to load it, feeding reanimation and flashback payoffs that wanted their best cards dead, not in hand. The discard half is doing the work; the draw is the admission fee that keeps the loop honest, since you cannot dump fuel without first replacing it. That it reads "target player" rather than "you" is a quiet wrinkle, opening the door to milling an opponent toward a deck-out or stuffing their yard with hate, though the gun almost always points at its own library. The body explains why it never warped formats on rate: a 2/1 that must survive a full turn cycle before it activates is fragile, and the first removal spell that comes along ends the engine before it ticks once. The tap cost is also the real constraint: one activation per turn, and never the turn it lands. Looter il-Kor later refined the idea by gating the loot through unblockable combat damage instead; this is the patient version, the one you commit to the board and dare the table to answer before you draw the line that matters.