Deliberate

The neater sibling of Anticipate, and the difference between the two is the whole reason this design exists. Both spells cost two mana, both replace themselves, and neither yields net card advantage. But Anticipate makes you commit to one of three cards and bottoms the rest, filtering aggressively at the cost of information you can never recover. This inverts the order of operations: it scries two before drawing, so you inspect the top two, decide how many to keep and how to arrange them, then draw. The card you draw is usually one of the two you just looked at, unless you bottomed both, which means the same action that replaces the spell also stacks your next turn. That ordering is the point. At instant speed, you hold it until you know exactly what the next few turns need: dig toward an answer, bury a flood of lands, or leave a live threat on top for the following draw. It is low-variance blue selection that will never win a game outright and never means to; the job is to make a deck run leaner by converting dead draws into a chosen sequence. Cards like this are the connective tissue of a control shell, the two-mana glue that keeps an engine from stalling on flood or screw, and scry 2 plus a card sits near the ceiling for what that role can ask at this cost before it tips into genuine card advantage.