Machinate

Card selection that scales to a board state was an early-era experiment in rewarding an artifact deck for doing exactly what it already wanted: flood the table. The depth you dig equals the number of artifacts you control, so the spell pays out in proportion to your commitment to the theme. The floor is brutal: with no artifacts in play X is zero, you look at nothing, and nothing reaches your hand, three mana for a literal blank. With a single artifact you peek at one card and take it with no choice in the matter, a strictly worse outcome than most cantrips at the same cost. The reward only arrives once your permanents have already built the board: at a high artifact count it becomes a near-guaranteed find of whatever piece you most need, a counterspell, a removal answer, or the missing combo half. That scaling is the whole bargain, and the instant-speed clause is what redeems the awkward early game, letting you hold it as a reactive tool during an opponent's turn rather than committing it on your own. This is one of those artifact-count payoffs that asked the deck to go all in before its rewards switched on, the same tension between consistency and build-around that artifact strategies have always negotiated. Unlike a fixed-depth dig, the variance here is self-inflicted: a thin board makes the spell thin, so it quietly enforces the commitment the rest of the archetype demands.