Merfolk Wayfinder
The card-advantage clause here is a trap dressed as a payoff: revealing three and keeping only the Islands sounds like raw selection, but it is the narrowest possible filter, returning anything that is not an Island to the bottom of your library. A deck running heavy basics turns the trigger into one-to-three cards of free fixing; a deck with split or fetch-heavy manabases watches its top three vanish. It is a design that taxes greedy mana and rewards mono-blue commitment, the kind of land-payoff incentive that nudged players toward straight Islands rather than splash configurations. The flying body is the quieter half of the bargain: 2 toughness sits right at the line every cheap sweeper of the era was tuned to clear, so this is no resilient flier, but a chump-and-recur piece that keeps blocking and pinging in the air once the trigger has cashed. It reads like a generic value creature, but the Island restriction makes it a piece of pure mono-blue economy: the more you lean your manabase on Island cards, the more reliably it shovels lands into your hand. The friction is honest. The trigger pays exactly as much as your deck is willing to give up to earn it.
