Consider

The refinement of a very old idea: pay one blue mana, dig one card deep, and replace the spell in hand. Ponder and Preordain set the ceiling for what a one-mana blue cantrip could do to a format, and both eventually paid for it with restrictions in eternal play. This is the sanitized descendant, and the difference is all in the direction of the selection. Where Ponder rearranges the top three and Preordain scries two before drawing, surveil only touches the single top card, and its one lever is binary: keep it on top or bury it. That constraint reads as weaker, but the graveyard clause is the entire point. Every card you decline goes to the yard rather than the bottom of the library, which turns a card-neutral cantrip into fuel: for delve costs, for flashback, for reanimation, for anything that counts bodies in the graveyard. It smooths a draw while it stocks a resource, and it does both at the cheapest possible price and at instant speed, so it slots into an end-step or holds up alongside interaction without costing a turn. The deliberate weakness of surveil compared to scry (no reordering, no depth) is what let Wizards print a Preordain-adjacent effect without repeating Preordain's history; the selection is narrower, but the byproduct is exactly what a graveyard deck wants.