Emmessi Tome

Card advantage in colorless form, sold at a tax the era thought was fair. Nine total mana to draw two and discard one nets a single card and filters a second, paid out across a four-mana investment up front and a five-mana activation every cycle. That rate reads as punitive now, but it answers a real constraint of early-set design: card draw is the most color-bleeding effect there is, and giving every deck access to a Jayemdae Tome variant means pricing it high enough that no deck wants it as a default. The high cost is precisely what lets the effect live in an artifact slot open to anyone. The discard clause is doing quiet work too, turning the activation from pure draw into a loot effect: the second card is not free advantage, it is selection, which is why the body of the ability looks worse than a flat two-card draw and is balanced accordingly. This sits on the same artifact-rate curve as Jayemdae Tome, the grindy colorless engine that asks you to sink your whole turn into it. Decks built to go long could lean on a colorless draw outlet when no color in the deck offered one; everyone else left it in the binder, which is exactly the outcome the pricing was engineered to produce.