Drag the Canal

The two-mana body-plus-token instant is a familiar shape in Dimir, but the conditional payload here is what earns the card its complexity. The guaranteed half is a 2/2 Detective at instant speed, which is a serviceable ambush blocker or a flash threat with a relevant creature type attached. The rest of the text only fires if a creature died this turn, and that gating is doing all the design work: the value ceiling (two life, surveil two, and a Clue on top of the body) is deliberately walled behind an aristocrats-shaped precondition rather than handed out for free. Cast it into an empty turn and you have paid two mana for a vanilla token; cast it after a trade, a sacrifice, or a removal spell, and it becomes a genuine card-advantage engine that also refills your graveyard and smooths your next draw. The card rewards holding it until the combat step or a kill spell has resolved, which turns a middling instant into a payoff for playing the death-trigger game most Dimir decks are already playing. Nothing on the card is individually loud; the interest is in how sharply the mode splits between the two contexts, and in how much of the token-generator-plus-life-plus-card-selection package the death clause is quietly rationing.