Mazemind Tome

Colorless card advantage that any deck can run has always been a design hazard: leave the rate open-ended and you print the default two-drop for every fair deck forever. This one buys its slot by counting its own uses. Every activation stacks a page counter, and the fourth ends the machine: it exiles itself and hands back four life. So the tome is not an engine you keep, it is a budget you spend. Four scries, four draws, or any mix, and then it is gone. That ceiling is what lets the rate be so generous: scry for a tap early, draw for two more later, and the life gain at the end reads less like a bonus than like a severance for retiring on schedule.

The flexibility lives inside that budget. The two modes share a counter but not a cost, so the tome flexes from a cheap dig-and-fix in the early turns to a repeatable card-draw outlet once the mana comes free, and the player decides the ratio in real time based on what the game needs. Colorless artifact card advantage that fits any deck and cannot overstay its welcome is a narrow window to design into, and this hits it cleanly enough to travel across formats without ever being the thing that warps one.