Feldon's Cane

The graveyard-as-resource conversation in Magic starts here. For one mana and a tap, you shuffle your entire graveyard into your library: no scaling cost, no color requirement, no restriction on what's being recovered. The price is paid in the artifact itself, which exiles on activation, so the effect is a one-shot rather than an engine. That single design choice is what has kept the card legal and largely unbroken for thirty years; every later "shuffle your graveyard back" effect (Elixir of Immortality, Gaea's Blessing, Tormod's Crypt's inverse cousins) inherits some version of the same discipline, whether through exile, life cost, or replacement-effect timing. The flavor frame matters too: Feldon was the artificer mourning his wife Loran, and the Cane is the artifact he built to preserve her memory, which is why the effect is recovery rather than reuse. In design terms, it is the first clean answer to mill as a win condition and the prototype for the "reset the deck" slot that mono-blue and colorless toolboxes have leaned on ever since. The rate has never been seriously revisited because it never needed to be; one mana to recycle a full graveyard remains the ceiling, and Wizards has been careful not to print past it.