Dazzling Lights
A defensive combat trick, which is the unusual part. Most one-mana blue instants that touch the board bounce a creature or counter a spell; this one shrinks an attacker's power by three and leaves the body otherwise intact. The -3/-0 works from the defending seat: it turns a lethal swing into chip damage, blanks a single big attacker for a turn, or lets a blocker survive combat without trading. It never touches the toughness axis, so it neither kills nor pumps; it is a tempo brake, not removal. What earns it consideration is the rider. Stapling surveil 2 onto the spell means that even when the -3/-0 does nothing meaningful, casting it still sculpts your next two draws and stocks the graveyard. The catch worth stating plainly: it needs a legal target to be cast at all, so on a genuinely empty board it sits dead in hand; the surveil is a bonus attached to a defensive play, not a reason to fire it into open air. That pairing reflects a design instinct common to the era, when blue's lighter interaction was often bolted to card selection so the spell paid rent on turns it did little else. Note too that surveil advances your library without replacing the card: it digs and it feeds the yard, but it does not draw, so the floor is selection, not a free card. The numbers are modest by intent, and the guaranteed sculpting is what makes running it liberally reasonable at all.

