Dredge

Long before the keyword that would later borrow its name, this was black's cleanest way to turn a permanent you no longer wanted into a fresh card. The transaction asks almost nothing of your mana, only a single black, and only that you have something expendable to feed it: a creature staring down a sweeper, a glut of lands you have stopped needing, a token doing nothing. Spend it on any of those and you cash a dead resource for a fresh one at instant speed. The timing window is what carries the design. Hold it up against a removal spell pointed at your best creature and you change what their spell does: they kill an empty target while the creature becomes a card in your hand. You came out even (they spent a removal spell, you spent a creature, and the card replaces itself), but you chose the exchange and they fizzled their answer on nothing. The combat line runs on the same principle, and its window is narrower than it looks: you have to feed the blocker to the spell while blocks are still declared but before damage resolves, because once damage lands, state-based actions destroy it and leave nothing to sacrifice. What it gives back is fixed and faceless, never the targeted dig of later black filtering, but the speed and the sacrifice clause make it a single flexible answer to a sweeper, to spent fodder, and to a flooded hand at once. It is black's oldest bargain, narrowed to a body or a land you had already written off.