Mirri's Guile
The cheapest deck-smoothing engine ever stapled to a permanent, and the genius is in what it refuses to do. It does not draw the cards; it only arranges them, leaving the top three of your library in whatever order you choose at the start of each upkeep. The single card you spend to resolve it is real cost, but the effect compounds turn after turn for a lone green mana with no further upkeep tax and no hand-size attrition once it is online. Sylvan Library, its more famous Tempest contemporary, pays in life to actually pull cards into hand; this one settles for the cheaper, quieter half of the bargain and asks nothing more after it lands. The payoff lives entirely in the floor it raises: an upkeep trigger rerolling your next draw step turns every land-flood gamble into a near-certainty of finding what you queued. It rewards a deck that knows exactly what it wants next, where the top card matters as much as the cards in hand, and it pairs with anything that cares about the top of the library or that draws extra to convert arrangement into raw selection. Functionally, it is filtering without the filter cost, a recurring upkeep manipulation that predates most of the scry-and-surveil vocabulary the game later standardized. The selection rate has never been beaten because there is nothing left to cut.


