Eye of Yawgmoth

The brutal elegance here is that the card converts a creature's power directly into card selection: sacrifice something enormous and dig deep, sacrifice something small and barely scratch the surface. Most sacrifice-for-cards engines of this early era priced their payout on bodies, turning creatures into cards at roughly a one-for-one rate, but this rig scales with power instead, so the natural shell is fat tokens, a single overgrown beater, or a creature you've pumped specifically to feed the slot. The catch lives in the exile clause: you reveal cards equal to the sacrificed creature's power, keep exactly one, and throw the rest away forever. That single-card payout is what stops a high-power sacrifice from becoming a free fistful of cards, and it forces a genuine decision about which creature dies and when, because burying a needed card under the exile is a permanent loss rather than a temporary detour. The colorless frame matters too: any deck can run it, and the activation is mana-hungry enough ( plus the tap plus the creature) that it reads as a grindy value engine rather than a combo enabler. It sits squarely in the Yawgmoth corner of the Phyrexian arc, where the design vocabulary is sacrifice-as-resource and bodies-as-currency: a machine that eats your creatures and pays you back in knowledge, parceling that knowledge out only as fast as the exile clause will allow.