Demonic Consultation

Six cards exiled off the top before the search even begins, then reveal-until-named keeps stripping the library down until your card turns up, however deep it sits. That cost is the entire design. For a fair deckbuilder it is a real tax on consistency: name a card you run a single copy of and the reveal step can shred your whole library hunting for it. The line is only safe when winning this turn is the plan, or when an empty library is itself the payoff. That is the asymmetry that made the card infamous: the cheapest, fastest way to find one specific card in black, priced for a game that ends before anything it threw away would have mattered. It pairs with the Thassa's Oracle and Laboratory Maniac school of wincons for exactly the reason it punishes grind: the same exile clause that wrecks a value deck hands a deck-out engine its entire setup. A near-empty library stops being the casualty and becomes the win condition. As a piece of conditional-cost design it is unusually pure, reckless in most hands and perfectly tuned for the narrow slice of decks built to ignore everything it discards. The cost never went away; the decks that learned to want it did.