Microscope

The whole design turns on a mechanical pun: point at any permanent card sitting in a graveyard, and it becomes a 0/0 black Germ until end of turn. Put something small under a microscope and find a living thing. Germ, the creature type that otherwise exists only to carry Living Weapon equipment, gets recast here as a temporary label slapped onto spent cards. The Surveil 1 half is filler, a way to sculpt draws and feed a graveyard incrementally; plenty of two-mana artifacts do that. The interesting wrinkle is that the target never leaves the bin: it becomes a creature card in the graveyard, not a creature on the battlefield, so it cannot die, be sacrificed, or trigger anything watching for a permanent leaving play. What the effect actually enables is graveyard reach that normally only touches creatures. For one turn, a dead artifact, enchantment, or old planeswalker counts as a creature, so recursion, reanimation, or type-matters payoffs can treat it as fair game. It is a designer's grin dressed up as an interaction, made possible because the game already had a monster named Germ sitting around waiting to be discovered.