Into the Pit
The family of cards that turn your library's uppermost card into a second hand, from Future Sight to Vizier of the Menagerie to Bolas's Citadel, all sell the same thing: free information plus a way to spend what you draw before you draw it. This one prices that access in a currency the others do not. Where its predecessors let you cast for mana or life, here every spell cast off the deck demands a nonland permanent sacrificed on top of its normal cost, which converts the whole engine from a card-advantage pump into an aristocrats feed. That reframing is the design's real work. Every cast becomes a sacrifice, every hidden card a resource you turn into board presence you were prepared to give up anyway. It rewards a deck stocked with disposable bodies (tokens, creatures with recursion built in, permanents whose deaths already pay you) rather than one that merely wants to see more cards. The tension is deliberate: you get to cast whatever waits above, but only while you always have something to throw away, so the engine sputters the moment your board runs dry. It is a peek-and-cast payoff written specifically for the color that has always been happiest turning permanents into fuel, and the sacrifice clause is what keeps it from being a strictly better version of the effects that came before it.
