Cerebral Confiscation

Discard has always split along a design fault line: the cheap strike that takes cards without looking, and the surgical extraction that lets the caster read the hand and pull the one card that matters. Duress asks for a color, Inquisition of Kozilek asks for a mana value, Thoughtseize asks for a life payment. What sits here is a choice between those two philosophies bolted into one sorcery. Against a hand you cannot see or do not need to see, the mode that strips two cards blindly does raw resource damage. Against a specific threat you have already clocked, the reveal-and-choose mode does the precise work, with the standard extraction caveat: it cannot touch a land, so an opponent holding only lands is safe from the surgical half and eats the blind discard instead. The modality is the whole design argument. A caster who commits to one effect at the printing table gives up flexibility; a caster who commits to neither, and lets the board state pick, pays a premium in mana over the specialists. Three is a fair number for that optionality, since neither half individually justifies it and the ability to switch does. It is a workmanlike take on a very old question, resolving the tension between raw quantity and targeted quality by refusing to answer it and charging you for the privilege of deciding late.