Grisly Salvage

The trade here is asymmetry in disguise: you spend two mana to dig five cards deep, but the filter only ever hands back a creature or a land. Everything else (your removal, your card draw, your finishers) goes to the bin. That restriction is not a tax so much as the entire point. This is graveyard-fuel masquerading as selection, and it has always lived in decks that want the mill as much as the hit. The instant speed is the underrated wrinkle: most budget self-mill moves at sorcery speed, so being able to fill a graveyard in response (before a reanimation trigger, after a fetchland cracks, holding it up across a turn cycle) sets it apart from the dredge-style enablers it sits beside. The miss case is real, and built into the design: whiff on creatures and lands and you have paid two mana to throw five cards away with nothing in hand to show for it. For the strategies it serves, that is a feature. It functions as both a land-fixer that smooths early draws and a delivery system for whatever you most want sitting in the yard, and it asks you to build a deck where the milled cards do work from the graveyard rather than being lost. The narrowness of the search is what makes the milling generous; widen the target and the card stops doing its real job.