Grinning Totem

Most theft effects pull from a zone you can see: a creature on the battlefield, a card already revealed in hand. This reaches into the library, the one zone players treat as inviolable, and it does so blind. You commit the activation before you know what's there, so the search becomes a dive into whatever the deck's best remaining card happens to be, and the cost structure makes you pay for it twice: four mana to deploy the artifact, then two more plus the tap and the sacrifice to fire it. The exile-then-play clause is the real friction. The card you steal is yours only until your next upkeep, so you need the mana and the timing to actually play it inside that single window, or it falls into its owner's graveyard and you've spent six mana to mildly thin their deck. That deadline keeps the effect honest: not a permanent theft so much as a one-turn loan with a punitive deposit. It belongs to Mirage's fascination with slow, ritualistic artifacts that reward patience and punish greed, built back when "search target opponent's library" felt exotic enough to wall behind a heavy, multi-step price rather than a clean keyword.