Forging the Anchor

Impulse gave you four cards and let you keep one; this pays three mana to look one card deeper and keep every artifact it finds. That trade is the whole design. Where a generic dig spell rations you to a single card because unconditional selection is expensive, this one hands you unlimited quantity in exchange for a hard filter: only artifacts come to hand, and the non-artifacts are buried at random rather than politely stacked. In a deck that is mostly artifacts, it stops being card selection and becomes raw card advantage, a blue draw spell that happens to demand you build around the metal. That is the tension a designer is buying with the artifact clause: the ceiling is huge, the floor collapses the moment your top five come up empty, and the random-bottoming means you cannot even set up your next draw as consolation. It is a payoff card wearing the costume of a filtering spell, and it only earns its rate at the density where an artifact deck stops looking like a normal deck at all.