Funeral Rites

Black paying life for cards is the oldest bargain in the color's book, and this one prices the draw in two currencies at once. Two cards for three mana is a rate white and blue would recognize, but black rarely gets it clean: here the surcharge is two life plus two cards off the top of your own library. That self-mill clause is the tell. It is not incidental symmetry to fill out the text box; it is the card's reason to exist in decks that treat the bin as an asset. For a plain draw-two, the mill is a cost you shrug at. For a reanimator shell, a delve engine, or anything that wants bodies and spells in the yard, the mill is a second effect wearing the costume of a downside. The design leans on that double-read: same card, opposite valuation depending on whether you care what leaves the top of your deck. Black's card-draw has always been transactional (Sign in Blood asks for life, Read the Bones asks for scry-then-life), and this one folds a graveyard-matters payoff into the same three-mana slot, which is why it plays as more than a life-for-cards filler. The refill and the fuel arrive on one sorcery, and which half you were buying tells you what deck you are actually playing.