Extract Brain
The trick with this kind of Mind's Desire cousin is who does the choosing, and the answer here is the opponent, which sounds ruinous until you count the ways it isn't. An opponent forced to hand you X of their own cards will part with the least useful ones they can, so the fantasy of ripping a game-ending bomb out of their grip rarely materializes cleanly. What the design actually rewards is information plus disruption at a single price point: you get to see X cards, and you get to fire one of them off for free, which means even a mediocre selection often yields a cheap tempo swing or a spell you'd happily cast anyway. The scaling matters more than the ceiling. At X of one you're paying three mana for a peek and a low-value steal; at higher X the opponent has to surrender a wider slice of their hand, and the odds of something genuinely worth casting climb even as they try to bait you with duds. It resolves the old tension in "steal from hand" effects (they either whiff or they're broken) by capping the theft at one card while making the reconnaissance total. You always learn X cards; you cast at most one. That asymmetry is the whole engine, and it plays cleanest in decks that can leverage the intelligence as much as the free spell.
