Farsight Ritual

The scaling here is the whole calculation: without paying anything, this is a four-card dig that hands you the best two, roughly the dig depth of a mid-sized card selection instant. Feed it something with Bargain, though, and the window doubles to eight cards deep while the payment stays the same. That is a large swing in effective card quality for the cost of one artifact, enchantment, or token you were prepared to spend anyway. The design lives on the tension between paying and not: cast it bare and it is a serviceable but unremarkable selection spell; cast it with a token you generated as a byproduct of some other line and it becomes one of the deepest instant-speed digs blue gets at four mana. The random-bottoming clause is the restriction that keeps the deep mode from doubling as a shuffle-free graveyard or library-order tool: you see eight, keep two, and lose control over the six you leave behind. What makes Bargain the interesting fold is that it turns spare permanents into raw card selection at instant speed, rewarding decks already flooding the board with disposable tokens rather than asking them to build around the payment. Left unpaid, it still functions; the sacrifice is upside, not a tax, which is the cleanest way to price an optional cost.