Lose Hope

A removal spell that mostly isn't one, paired with card selection that mostly is. The -1/-1 here is a footnote: it kills a token or a one-toughness mana dork, shrinks an attacker out of a trade, but against anything with two toughness it is a speed bump. The real product you are buying for a single black mana is Scry 2 at instant speed, and the creature debuff is the rider that justifies the slot. That inversion is the design's whole logic: a smoothing spell wearing a removal spell's clothes, built so that in the rare game where the tiny shrink matters it has done something, and in every other game it has at least fixed your next two draws. There is friction worth naming, though: the spell needs a legal target to cast at all, so there must be a creature in play to point the -1/-1 at, which means you cannot crack it end of step to dig when the board is empty. And because it scries without drawing, you are spending a real card from hand for the effect, not replacing itself the way a cantrip does. That is the trade the package asks you to accept: a card down, two cards smoothed, and a small body sometimes removed along the way. This is the cheap-spell template that staples a marginal combat effect to library manipulation, the bet being that a turn spent thinning chaff off the top is rarely wasted, even when the shrink does nothing.