Merchant's Dockhand

The activation cost is the whole machine here: the is just the toll, and the real engine is tapping X untapped artifacts to scale how deep you dig. With one spare artifact you peek at the top card; on a board littered with Servos, Thopters, and Treasure you can look five or six deep and pull the perfect answer into your hand, leaving the rest on the bottom. That makes the dig a function of how wide your artifact board already is, which is a quietly elegant way to gate card selection behind the payoff for building an affinity-style board in the first place. There is a real cost to the depth, too: every artifact you tap for the activation is one you cannot tap for mana or crew that turn, so the more cards you sift, the more of your board you have committed to selection rather than offense for the cycle. The 1/2 body is incidental, a cheap chassis whose only job is to deploy the ability; it can never be one of the X artifacts itself, since the activation already requires tapping it. As a payoff piece it sits in the artifact-matters lineage of cards that convert raw permanent count into card selection rather than damage or mana, an Impulse-style filtering engine for decks that already wanted to flood the table with cheap metal.